PHILOSOPHY  OF  KNOWLEDGE 


PROFESSOR   LADD'S   WORKS. 


PHILOSOPHY  OF  KNOWLEDGE.  An  Inquiry  into 
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ELEMENTS  OF  PHYSIOLOGICAL  PSYCHOLOGY. 
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PHILOSOPHY  OF  KNOWLEDGE 


AN  INQUIRY 


INTO 


THE  NATURE,   LIMITS,   AND   VALIDITY 


OF 


HUMAN   COGNITIVE  FACULTY 


BY 

GEORGE  TRUMBULL  _LADD 

PROFESSOR   OF   PHILOSOPHY   IN  YALE    UNIVERSITY 


NEW  YORK 
CHARLES    SCRIBNER'S    SONS 

1897 


Copyright,  1897,  by 
CHARLES  SCRIBNER'S  SONS. 


SEnibersttg 
JOHN  WILSON  AND  SON,  CAMBRIDGE,  U.  S.  A. 


VVTVFT?SITY  OF 

COLLEGE  LIBfi 


16 
3  fS 


TO 

THOSE   WHO 

BY   SERIOUS   AND    PROLONGED 
INQUIRY,  HOWEVER   SCEPTICAL,  ASPIRE 

TO   APPROACH   THE   TRUTH, 

THIS   BOOK   IS    RESPECTFULLY 

AND   AFFECTIONATELY 

DEDICATED 


"  Shall  we  not  look  into  the  laws 
Of  life  and  death,  and  things  that  seem, 
And  things  that  be,  and  analyze 
Our  double  nature?" 


PREFACE 


r  I  AHIS  book  is  an  Essay  in  the  interests  of  some  of  the 
•*•  most  profound  and  difficult  of  the  problems  which  can 
engage  the  reflective  thinking  of  man.  It  would  scarcely  be 
an  exaggeration  to  say  that  the  nature,  limits,  and  guaranty  of 
knowledge  afford  subjects  of  inquiry  which  exceed  all  others 
in  the  demand  they  make  for  deep  and  earnest  reflection.  If 
one  were  at  liberty  to  construct  a  Theory  of  Reality  which 
should  be  simply  a  logically  consistent  and  symmetrical 
affair,  satisfactory  to  the  ideals  of  the  architect  but  without 
regard  to  foundations  of  fact  or  questions  of  the  right  to 
occupy  the  ground  in  this  way,  the  task  would  seem  compara- 
tively light.  But  in  this  day,  and  in  the  face  of  history,  such 
a  liberty  cannot  be  intelligently  claimed  ;  much  less  can  it  be 
successfully  exercised.  Facts  must  be  considered,  and  ques- 
tions of  right  cannot  be  thrust  aside  or  overlooked.  For 
the  former  part  of  one's  philosophical  basis,  the  particular 
sciences  are  now  responsible  ;  for  the  latter  part  —  the  search 
after  guide  and  guaranty  —  a  particular  form  of  philosophical 
discipline,  sometimes  called  epistemology,  is  invoked.  It  is 
this  form  of  philosophy  which  this  book  undertakes.  Its 
author  asks  that  the  intrinsic  character  of  its  problems,  and 
all  the  perplexities  it  entails,  should  be  constantly  remem- 
bered by  the  reader. 

1  should  probably  have  found  my  self-imposed  task  some- 
what less   troublesome  if  I  had  more   predecessors   among 


Vlll  PREFACE 

modern  writers  on  philosophy  in  English.  But,  so  far  as  I 
am  aware,  there  are  none  from  whom  any  help  is  to  be  de- 
rived.1 In  Germany  a  considerable  number  of  books,  with  the 
title  Urkenntnisslehre,  or  some  similar  title,  have  recently  ap- 
peared ;  and  German  works  on  Logic  and  systematic  Philos- 
ophy have  generally  the  merit  of  dealing  in  a  more  thorough 
way  with  the  epistemological  problem,  wherever  they  touch 
its.  sensitive  points,  than  is  customary  in  England  or  this 
country.  Now  and  then  a  French  writer,  too,  has  afforded 
a  hint,  or  suggestion,  of  which  I  have  availed  myself.  So 
far  as  these  helps  have  been  consciously  received,  they  have 
been  acknowledged  in  the  few  references  of  the  text.  But  I 
think  it  fair  to  ask  that  this  book  should  be  regarded  as, 
much  more  exclusively  than  often  occurs,  the  outcome  of  its 
author's  own  reflections  over  the  difficult  questions  it  essays 
to  answer.  It  asks  and  should  receive  the  treatment  due  to 
a  pioneer  work. 

At  the  same  time  it  is  also  true  that  no  other  questions, 
practical  or  philosophical,  are  being  more  anxiously  considered 
or  are  more  influential  over  life  and  conduct  than  those  which 
merge  themselves  in  the  epistemological  problem.  While 
this  problem  is  reflected  upon,  largely  in  an  unguided  and 
illogical  way,  by  multitudes  of  minds,  the  authorities,  who 
ought  also  to  be  guides  in  reflective  thinking,  have  been  of 
late  accustomed  to  reiterate  the  cry  of  "  Back  to  Kant !  "  As 
a  student  for  years  of  the  critical  philosophy,  I  have  not  been 
unmindful  of  the  demand  to  place  myself  in  the  line  of  its 
development  of  the  epistemological  inquiry.  I  have  had  the 
method  and  the  conclusions  of  the  great  master  in  criticism 
before  me,  from  the  beginning  to  the  end  of  my  work.  Yet 

1  An  exception  cannot  be  made  in  the  case  of  Mr.  Hobhouse's  elaborate  work, 
"  The  Theory  of  Knowledge,"  since  it  is  confessedly  a  treatise  in  Logic  rather 
than  Epistemology,  as  I  conceive  of  epistemological  problems  and  method. 


PREFACE  ix 

the  positions  to  which  my  independent  investigations  have 
forced  me  are  chiefly  critical  of,  and  antagonistic  to,  the  posi- 
tions of  the  Critique  of  Pure  Reason. 

If  I  may  claim  any  peculiar  merit  for  the  method  followed 
in  discussing  the  problem  of  knowledge,  it  is  perhaps  chiefly 
this :  I  have  striven  constantly  to  make  epistemology  vital,  — 
a  thing  of  moment,  because  indissolubly  and  most  intimately 
connected  with  the  ethical  and  religious  life  of  the  age.  I 
have  no  wish  to  conceal,  therefore,  the  quite  unusual  interest 
which  I  take  in  the  success  of  this  book  ;  I  sincerely  hope 
that  it  may  be  a  guide  and  help  to  not  a  few  of  those  minds 
to  whom  I  have  dedicated  it. 

GEORGE  TRUMBULL  LADD. 
YALE  UNIVERSITY,  May,  1897. 


CHAPTER  I 
THE  PROBLEM 


PAGE 


The  Anthropological  View  —  Standpoint  of  Psychology  —  Appeal  to  Rea- 
soii  —  Kant's  Position  in  History  —  Relation  to  Metaphysics  —  Freedom 
from  Assumption  —  The  Primary  Datum  —  The  Dilemma  stated  — 
Sources  of  an  Answer— The  Implicates  necessary  —  The  Method  to 
be  pursued  —  Practical  Benefits  expected 1 


CHAPTER  II 
HISTORY  OF  OPINION 

Purpose  of  the  Sketch  —  The  View  of  Plato  —  The  Doctrine  of  Aristotle  — 
Post-Aristotelian  Schools  —  Origen's  Doctrine  of  Faith  and  Knowledge  — 
Augustine's  Merits  in  Epistemology  —  The  Middle  Ages 30 

CHAPTER  HI 
HISTORY  OF  OPINION  (continued) 

The  Position  of  Descartes  —  Pioneer  Work  of  Locke  —  Views  of  Berkeley 

—  Scepticism  of  Hume  —  Position  of  Leibnitz  —  Kant's  Critical  Work  ; 
His  Problem  and  Conclusions  —  Kant's  Ethical  Interests  —  Hegel  and 

Schopenhauer    57 

CHAPTER  IV 
THE  PSYCHOLOGICAL  VIEW 

Psychology  and  Epistemology  —  Origin  of  Knowledge  —  Psychic  Factors  of 
Cognition  —  Corollaries  following  —  Possibilities  of  the  Case  —  Cognition 
as  Consciousness  —  as  Awareness  of  an  Object  —  Misstatements  criticised 

—  Problem  restated 94 


xii  CONTENTS 

CHAPTER  V 
THINKING  AND  KNOWING 

PAGE 

Relations  of  Thought  to  Cognition  —  Views  of  Others  —  Thinking  as  Activ- 
ity—  and  Positing  of  Relations —  Nature  of  the  Cognitive  Judgment  — 
""Implicates  of  allJudgment — .Conceptual  Knowledge_and  Reasoning  .     .130 

CHAPTER  VI 
KNOWLEDGE  AS  FEELING  AND  WILLING 

The  Psychology  of  Feeling  —  Emotional  Factors  m  Cognition  —  Influence 
on  intellectual  Development  —  Impulsive  Emotions  —  Ethical  and  ^Es- 
thetical  Feeling  —  Feelings  regulative  of  Logical  Processes  —  So-called 
"  integrating  "  Emotions  —  Place  of  Will  in  Cognition 160 

CHAPTER   VII 
KNOWLEDGE  OF  THINGS  AND  OF  SELF 

Distinction  of  Subject  and  Object  —  Position  of  Formal  Logic  —  Office  of 
Self-Consciousness  —  Implicates  of  Reality  —  Identity  of  Self  as  implied 
—  Distinction  of  Things  and  Self  —  Diremptive  Work  of  Intellect  —  The 
Function  of  Analogy  —  Epistemology  of  Perception  —  and  of  Science  .  .193 

CHAPTER  VIII 
DEGREES,  LIMITS,  AND  KINDS  OF  KNOWLEDGE 

Meaning  of  Terms  —  Standards  of  Measurement  of  Cognition  —  Relation  of 
Knowledge  to  Life  —  Nature  of  Opinion  —  Possibility  of  Knowledge  in 
Dreams  —  Distinctions  Relative  —  Essentials  of  Cognition  —  Limits  not 
Presuppositions  —  Kinds  of  Limits  —  Limits  of  Perception — and  of 
Science  —  Kinds  of  Knowledge  —  Case  of  Mathematics  —  Immediate  and 
Mediate  Knowledge 228 

CHAPTER  IX 
IDENTITY  AND  DIFFERENCE 

Experience  and  Cognition  —  Fundamental  Principles  of  all  Knowledge  — 
Views  of  Logic  —  Meaning  of  Identity  —  The  Principle  as  applied  to 
Reality 268 


CONTENTS  xiii 


CHAPTER  X 
SUFFICIENT  REASON 


PAOB 


Nature  of  Seasoning  —Development  of  Reasoning  —  Application  to  Reality 

—  Kant's  inadequate  View  —  Causation  and  External  Nature Origin  o'f 

the  Principle  —  Use  of  Cognitive  Judgments  —  Difficulties  of  Syllogism 

—  Concerned  in  Self-Knowledge  —  Assumptions  involved  —  Goal  of  En- 
deavor —  The  Grounds  of  Natural  Science  —  Final  Purpose  implied     .     .  283 


CHAPTER  XI 
EXPERIENCE  AND  THE  TRANSCENDENT 

Meaning  of  Experience  —  The  misleading  Figures  of  Speech  —  Experience 
necessarily  Transcendent  —  Conditions  of  Experience  —  and  its  Laws     .  322 


CHAPTER  XII 
THE  IMPLICATES  OF  KNOWLEDGE 

The  Question  stated  —  Modes  of  Implication  possible  —  Necessity  of  Com- 
pleteness of  View — Being  of  Self  implied  —  and  of  Not-Self  —  Influence 
of  ethical  and  sesthetical  Considerations  —  System  of  Ontology  involved  — 
The  principal  Categories  guaranteed 337 


CHAPTER  XIII 
SCEPTICISM,  AGNOSTICISM,  AND  CRITICISM 

Attitudes  of  Mind  toward  Truth  —  Unity  of  Experience  —  Sources  and 
Value  of  Scepticism — Limits  of  Scepticism  —  Doubts  in  Perception  and 
in  Science  —  Necessity  for  Agnosticism  —  Limits  of  Agnosticism  — 
Knowledge  positive 367 

CHAPTER  XIV 

ALLEGED  "  ANTINOMIES  " 

Effect  of  the  Antinomy  —  Meaning  of  the  Term  —  Denial  of  the  Doctrine  of 
Antinomies  —  Claims  of  Kant  examined  —  Mr.  Bradley's  Views  criticised 
—  Application  of  the  Categories  to  Reality 396 


XIV  CONTENTS 


CHAPTER  XV 
TRUTH  AND  ERROR 

PAGE 

Nature  of  the  Distinction  —  Error  as  non-Truth  —  Error  aiid  Wrong-doing  — 
Truth  dependent  on  Judgment  —  and  on  the  Meaning  of  Judgment  — 
Nature  of  Mathematical  Truth  —  The  Truth  of  Perception  —  Truth  and  v 
Error  in  Science  —  Foundations  of  Scientific  Knowledge  —  Sources  of 
Error  —  True  Cognition  of  Self  —  Criterion  of  Truth  —  Belief  and 
Reality  ".424 


CHAPTER   XVI 
THE  TELEOLOGY  OF  KNOWLEDGE 

Cognition  and  Action  —  The  Teleology  of  Perception  —  and  of  Conception 
—  Final  Purpose"  among  the  Sciences  — Knowledge  as  Endinjiself— , 
Knowledge  as  Part  of  .Life  —  Final  Purpq£eln~:RSality 472 

CHAPTER  XVII 
ETHICAL  AXD  ^ESTHETICAL  "  MOMENTA  "  OF  KNOWLEDGE 

Character  and  Cognition  —  Influence  of  Feeling  on  Judgment  —  Attribu- 
tion of  Ideals  to  Nature  —  Benevolence  of  Law  —  Limits  of  the  Ethical 
"  Momenta  "  —  Characteristics  of  ^Esthetical  Consciousness  —  Beauty  in 
Reality  —  The  Epistemological  Postulate 500 

CHAPTER   XVIII 
KNOWLEDGE  AND  REALITY 

Cognition  as  Species  of  "  Commerce  "  —  Failures  of  the  Identity-hypothe- 
sis —  Distinction  in  Reality  necessary  to  Knowledge  —  Truth  in  all  Kinds 
of  Cognition  —  Variety  of  the  real  World  —  Causation  as  Connection  in 
Reality 530 

CHAPTER   XIX 
IDEALISM  AND  REALISM 

Danger  of  exclusive  Views  —  Tenable  Positions  of  Idealism  —  Negation  of 
its  Extremes — The  Truth  of  Realism  —  Criticism  of  its  Denials  —  The 
true  Picture  of  Reality 559 


CONTENTS  XV 

CHAPTER  XX 
DUALISM  AND  MONISM 

PAOB 

Conceptions  of  Number  applied  to  Reality  —  Unity  and  Duality  of  Body  and 
Mind  —  Unity  of  the  Self — Defects  of  extreme  Dualism — The  Truth 
and  the  Limitations  of  Monism 574 

CHAPTER  XXI 
KNOWLEGE  AND  THE  ABSOLUTE 

Final  Position  of  Agnosticism  —  Explication  of  Terms  —  Danger  from  ab- 
stract Conceptions  —  Unchanging  Laws  of  Cognition  —  Presence  of  the 
Absolute  in  Consciousness  —  The  comprehensive  View  of  Epistemology  .  591 

INDEX  .  611 


PHILOSOPHY  OF  KNOWLEDGE 


CHAPTER  I 

THE  PROBLEM 

'""pvETE  struggles  of  the  mind  of  man  to  come  to  a  satis- 
*-  factory  understanding  with  itself  are  among  the  most 
interesting  exhibitions  of  his  greatness.  This  is  true  from 
whichever  of  several  points  of  view  we  regard  the  phenomena. 
For  suppose  that  —  disregarding  for  the  moment  the  more 
distinctively  metaphysical  considerations  —  we  approach  the 
subject  in  the  light  of  the  biological  and  anthropological 
sciences.  The  surpassingly  strange  spectacle  of  an  animal 
which  is  not  content  with  the  occupations  prompted  by  a 
restless  and  almost  unceasing  practical  curiosity,  nor  satisfied 
simply  to  learn  how  it  may  possess  and  use  the  instruments 
of  its  own  temporary  well-being,  is  certainly  most  attractive 
to  a  reflective  mind.  During  certain  periods  at  least  of  its 
existence  the  human  animal  exhibits  a  solicitude  respecting 
the  truth  of  its  own  being;  it  becomes  caretaking  as  to  the 
validity  of  its  knowledge  of  the  being  and  transactions  of 
things.  But  why  should  not  man  be  satisfied  to  realize,  in 
mere  living,  a  fairly  uninterrupted  succession  of  pleasant 
states  of  feeling,  and  to  let  the  painful  experiences  that 
trouble  the  flow  of  the  stream  of  consciousness  fade  away 
in  the  dreamlike  illusoriness  of  an  animal's  memory? 

Like  the  other  higher  animals,  man  is  consciously  earnest 
and  absorbed  in  the  pursuit  of  various  forms  of  eudsemouistic 

i 


2  THE  PROBLEM 

good.  But  unlike  all  the  other  animals,  so  far  as  we  are 
able  to  get  behind  the  barriers  interposed  between  us  and 
their  psychical  states,  man  comes  to  regard  this  very  concep- 
tion of  "  truth  "  as  something  in  itself  good.  Then  he  turns 
upon  his  own  reason  with  a  complaint  which  is  frequently 
bitter,  or  with  a  self-accusation  of  impotence  which  may 
become  savage,  in  the  demand  that  it  should  furnish  him 
with  a  more  complete  authentication  for  the  good  which 
bears  this  peculiar  form.  Moreover,  the  truth,  as  he  con- 
ceives of  it,  is  in  his  thought  correlated  with  what  he  calls 
"reality."  Indeed,  what  he  means  by  that  kind  of  truth, 
which  he  needs  to  possess  in  order  fully  to  satisfy  the 
demands  of  reason,  is  not  definable  without  an  implicate  of 
reality.  But  why,  again,  as  merely  the  highest  form  of 
animal  life,  should  man  alone  among  all  the  species  not  be 
satisfied  with  appearances,  if  only  they  be  of  a  pleasant  char- 
acter? Why  should  he  insist  on  dissecting  his  puppets  to 
determine  whether  they  have  the  anatomy  of  actual  living 
things,  or  not ;  why  be  so  eager  to  disturb  the  interest  in  the 
show  of  appearance  by  exposing  too  cruelly  the  actual  mech- 
anism of  the  strings  ?  We  can  discover  no  wholly  adequate 
answer  —  no  very  convincing  partial  answer  —  which  modern 
biology  has  afforded  to  inquiries  such  as  these.  And  yet 
phenomena  of  this  kind  are  undoubted  facts  in  the  complex 
life  of  humanity. 

Or  suppose  the  same  phenomena  to  be  approached  from 
the  anthropological  and  historical  points  of  view.  Here  it 
cannot  easily  be  denied  that  the  unsatisfied  need  for  valid- 
ating as  "  truth,"  in  conscious  attitudes,  the  various  presen- 
tations of  sense,  the  trains  of  associated  ideas,  and  the 
abstract  concepts,  as  well  as  the  varied  and  ceaseless  efforts 
which  men  make  to  satisfy  this  need,  have  always  been  most 
important  factors  to  aid  in  the  evolution  of  the  race.  All 
merely  anthropological  theories  of  evolution,  however,  appear 
unable  to  account  for  the  existence  of  this  need ;  and  we 


THE  PROBLEM  3 

believe  that  they  not  only  arc  now,  but  will  always  remain, 
quite  outside  of  such  a  task.  The  right  claimed  by  the 
majority  of  the  students  of  modern  science,  distinctly  to  aim 
at  keeping  clear  of  all  metaphysics  and  so-called  "  theories  of 
knowledge,"  may  be  conceded.  And  indeed,  if  there  could 
be  knowledge  that  is  not  something  much  more  than  this 
majority  will  admit  it  to  be,  science  itself  would  consist  of 
a  succession  of  presentations  of  sense,  associated  ideas,  and 
thoughts,  about  the  truth  of  which  no  one  would  ever  even 
raise  a  question.  From  the  merely  logical  and  formal  point 
of  view,  the  peculiar  kind  of  syllogism  which  belongs  to 
science,  as  such,  may  fitly  be  called  the  hypothetical  syl- 
logism. Its  form  is  as  follows  :  If  A  is  B,  then  (7  is  D ; 
but  whether  or  not  A  really  is,  and  whether,  admitting  that 
both  it  and  B  really  are,  they  are  actually  related  as  belong- 
ing to  the  same  species,  or  as  reciprocal  influences  in  deter- 
mining the  same  result,  —  with  this,  science  need  not  concern 
itself.  Only  now,  such  science  could  scarcely  be  called 
knowledge ;  much  less,  truth.  For,  as  we  undertake  to  show 
in  detail  later  on,  the  words  "  knowledge  "  and  "  truth  "  are 
significant  of  mental  processes  and  mental  positions  which 
can  neither  be  attained  nor  stated  by  the  use  of  the  hypo- 
thetical syllogism  merely.  But  the  moment  we  consider  the 
evolution  of  science  itself  as  a  growth  in  actual  cognition, 
whether  on  the  part  of  the  individual  or  of  the  race,  we  intro- 
duce the  epistemological  problem  ;  and  this  problem  cannot 
even  be  considered  from  the  merely  anthropological  point  of 
view. 

It  would  furnish  a  most  curious  bit  of  research  to  deter- 
mine what  the  development  of  physical  science  would  have 
been,  if  only  its  students  had  really  held  the  above-mentioned 
conception  of  it.  Would  it  now  continue  to  advance,  if 
investigators  and  the  people  generally  attached  to  its  con- 
clusions only  the  significance  and  validity  which  belong  to 
dreams  ?  However  we  might  incline  to  answer  this  question, 


4  THE  PROBLEM 

one  thing  is  sure.  "  Science,"  thus  conceived  of,  would 
suffer  a  mighty  and  pathetic  fall  from  its  place  of  dignity 
in  the  present  estimate  of  mankind.  Theories  of  evolution 
as  applied  to  the  human  race,  stand  in  respect  to  this  instinc- 
tive metaphysical  faith,  less  in  the  relation  of  satisfactory 
explanatory  causes  than  of  partial  effects.  They  are  them- 
selves mental  phenomena,  for  the  understanding  of  which  we 
must  resort  to  a  study  of  the  constitution  of  reason  itself. 

The  conclusion  which  has  just  been  drawn  from  a  brief 
survey  of  the  merely  biological  and  anthropological  aspects 
of  our  problem  may  be  summarized  as  follows.  What  man- 
kind calls  its  knowledge,  or  science,  of  Self  and  of  Things, 
is  assumed  to  be  something  more  than  mere  self-referring, 
psychical  occurrences, — mere  presentations  of  sense,  asso- 
ciated ideas,  and  subjectively  connected  thoughts.  It  is 
assumed  to  be  the  truth,  either  already  attained  or  capable  of 
being  reached  and  verified.  And  by  "  truth  "  men  generally 
understand  a  form  of  mental  representation  which  has  its 
correlate  in  reality,  in  the  actual  being  and  matter-of-fact 
performances  of  things.  Yet  doubt  is  constantly  arising  as 
to  the  meaning  and  as  to  the  validity  of  this  universal 
assumption.  The  doubt  is  productive  of  restless  endeavor,  as 
well  as  of  sadness,  increased  doubt,  and  even  of  indifference 
and  disgust,  when  the  assumption  itself  is  made  the  subject 
of  inquiry.  It  is  somehow  thus  that  the  problem  of  knowl- 
edge has  progressively  defined  and  emphasized  itself  as  an 
influential  factor  in  the  development  of  the  reflective  thinking 
of  man.  The  problem  is  by  no  means  new,  as  the  history 
of  this  thinking  conclusively  shows. 

It  is  to  the  increasingly  keen  and  searching  analysis  of 
mental  processes,  to  the  science  of  psychology,  and  to  the 
critical  examination  of  reason — first  undertaken  in  a  thor- 
ough and  methodical  way  by  Kant  —  that  we  must  resort 
for  the  more  definite,  technically  exact  statement  of  our 
problem.  Now  psychology,  as  its  very  nature  and  legiti- 


THE  PROBLEM  5 

mate  mission  compel  it,  considers  all  cognitions,  whether  of 
the  ordinary  or  of  the  so-called  scientific  variety,  as  merely 
mental  (or  subjective)  phenomena.  For  it,  all  beings  are 
resolvable  into  states  of  consciousness.  Its  definition  is, 
"  The  science  of  states  of  consciousness,  as  such."  And  as 
its  means  for  analyzing  the  content  of  consciousness  become 
improved  and  are  more  faithfully  and  skilfully  applied,  and 
as  the  laws  of  the  combination  and  succession  of  the  dif- 
ferent states  of  consciousness  are  brought  to  light,  the  entire 
domain  of  knowledge  is  made  the  subject  of  its  investigations. 
All  cognitions,  all  sciences,  undoubtedly  are  states  of  con- 
sciousness ;  from  the  psychological  point  of  view,  they  are 
simply  this.  The  one  psychological  assumption,  from  which 
no  escape  is  possible,  the  assumption  which  is  presupposi- 
tionless  and  absolutely  undeniable,  is  this :  My  cognition  is 
a  process  in  my  consciousness.  But  this  assumption  is  as  true 
for  you,  and  for  him  (for  "  the  other,"  whoever  he  may  be), 
as  it  is  for  me.  It  is  as  true,  when  the  object  of  cognition 
is  a  thing,  a  stone  or  a  star  or  a  microbe,  as  when  the  ob- 
ject of  cognition  is  definitively  recognized  as  my  own  state, 
whether  in  the  form  of  a  toothache  or  a  thought  about  God. 
The  ultimate  psychic  fact  is  simply  :  "  I  KNOW." 

Further,  all  the  researches  of  modern  psychology  tend  to 
show  that  in  those  mysterious  beginnings  of  psychic  life, 
which  are  forever  hidden  from  direct  observation  and  from 
recognitive  memory,  ideation  and  object  existed  as  in  a 
common  root  of  consciousness.  One  may  speak  of  these 
beginnings  as  the  "original  unity  of  our  perceptive  life," 
as  the  original  "unity  of  apperception,"  or  as  one  please. 
Nothing  more  impresses  students  of  Kant  than  his  elaborate 
architectonic  in  exhibition  of  the  complicated  nature  of  that 
mental  edifice,  ascribed  in  part  to  imagination  and  in  part 
to  intellect,  which  the  unity  of  apperception  constructs.  But 
those  who  dissent  from  the  Kantian  method  and  its  conclu- 
sions, and  will  hear  nothing  of  "psychic  synthesis,"  even 


6  THE  PROBLEM 

as  a  conscious  and  self-active  energy,  are  compelled  either 
to  resort  to  the  hypothesis  of  sensations  that  somehow  get 
together  or  put  themselves  together;  or  else  they  have  alto- 
gether to  abandon  the  problem  of  psychic  unity  of  any  kind. 

What  all  are  aware  of,  however,  whether  psychologists  or 
not,  and  independently  of  learned  or  thoughtless  talk  about 
"synthesis"  and  "apperception,"  is  a  most  startling  experi- 
ence of  an  opposite  kind.  It  has  already  been  said  that  the 
one  indisputable  fact  upon  which  epistemological  doctrine 
must  build  is  the  "I  know"  of  every  man's  consciousness. 
This  fact,  when  repeated  and  generalized,  becomes  the  foun- 
dation of  the  most  presuppositionless  of  all  psychological 
truths,  —  "  all  cognition  is  a  process  in  consciousness. "  But 
on  the  very  first  experience  of  this  fact,  and  in  connection 
with  all  experiences  of  this  truth,  knowledge  appears  no 
longer  as  a  one-sided  affair.  It  appears  rather  as  an  affair 
of  Subject  and  Object;  and,  in  the  greater  number  of  its 
most  impressive  instances,  it  becomes  an  affair  implying  a 
fundamental  and  unalterable  distinction  between  Self  and 
Things. 

The  general  fact  of  cognition  requires  restatement,  then, 
in  the  following  way.  It  is  still,  undoubtedly,  a  state  of 
consciousness ;  or  rather,  it  is  a  conscious  process.  It  is  also 
a  state  of  my  consciousness,  a  conscious  process  which  — 
including,  as  it  must,  its  object-thing  —  I  attribute  to  myself 
as  subject,  and  call  my  own.  But  this  object,  which  is  my 
object-consciousness,  my  state  objectively  described,  is  cog- 
nized as  not-me,  as  "  out  of  "  me.  Objectivity,  in  the  sense 
of  ^raws-subjectivity,  the  really  existent  out  of  my  conscious 
state,  is,  then,  as  will  be  shown  in  detail  elsewhere,  the 
implicate  of  every  truly  cognitive  act  of  mine.  The 
inquiries,  how  this  can  be,  and  what  is  implied  as  to  a 
reality  that  is  trans-subjective,  constitute  the  problem  of  the 
philosophy  of  knowledge.  The  descriptive  science  of  psy- 
chology, in  its  study  of  the  plain  man's  consciousness,  shows 


THE  PROBLEM  7 

beyond  all  doubt  that  knowledge,  even  as  admitted  fact  and 
state  of  consciousness,  cannot  be  faithfully  described,  on 
the  basis  of  a  full  and  satisfactory  analysis,  without  recog- 
nition of  this  implicate  of  what  is  not  a  present  fact  and 
state  of  consciousness.  Thus  much,  at  the  very  least,  must 
be  insisted  upon.  For  the  time  being  let  those  think,  who 
so  think  can,  that  knowledge  is  explicable  without  recog- 
nition of  the  reality  both  of  the  object  and  of  the  subject, 
as  a  self-active  and  self-conscious  synthesis,  a  unifying 
life-force. 

It  appears,  then,  that  the  subjective  and  the  formal  lies, 
in  the  process  of  cognition,  actually  inseparable  as  an  expe- 
rience from  the  trans-subjective  and  the  real.  The  two  ex- 
ist, as  it  were,  side  by  side  and  in  a  living  unity;  and  yet 
the  two  are  not  incapable  of  being  distinguished  both  by 
immediate  introspection  and  by  reflective  thinking.  For 
cognition  is  a  modification  of  consciousness  that  is  depen- 
dent, in  part,  for  its  existence  and  for  its  particular  form, 
upon  reality  outside  of  consciousness  (upon  not-my-con- 
sciousness).  On  the  one  hand,  it  cannot  be,  or  even  be 
conceived  of,  other  than  as  a  modification  of  consciousness. 
It  must  be  explained  as  dependent,  both  for  its  existence  and 
for  its  form,  upon  the  fact  and  the  laws  of  the  cognizing 
subject.  On  the  other  hand,  its  existence  implies,  and  its 
form  requires  for  explanation,  some  other  being  than  that 
which  is  present  in  the  modified  consciousness.  As  to 
the  further  analysis  and  explanation,  the  import,  and  the 
validating  of  the  import,  of  all  this,  the  philosophical  theory 
of  knowledge  inquires. 

The  problem  of  knowledge  is  not,  however,  grasped  in  its 
entirety  and  handled  in  a  manner  to  promise  a  solution 
which  is  either  theoretically  satisfying  or  practically  help- 
ful, until  it  is  seen  that  both  problem  and  solution  lie 
embedded,  so  to  speak,  in  the  very  heart  of  reason  itself. 
It  was  the  distinctive  merit  of  Kant,  as  has  already  been 


8  THE  PROBLEM 

implied,  to  make  this  truth  clear  as  it  had -never  been  made 
clear  before.  Since  his  day,  the  theory  of  knowledge 
(Bpistemology  or  Noetics,  sometimes  so  called)  has  been 
one  of  the  most  active  and  fruitful  branches  of  philosophical 
discipline.  Indeed,  some  have  gone  so  far  as  to  make  the 
formation  of  a  theory  of  knowledge  coincident  with  the 
entire  function  of  philosophy.  That  which  calls  itself 
knowledge  of  the  universe  "we  call  self-knowledge,"  says 
Kuno  Fischer.1  We  cannot  agree  to  this  restriction  in  the 
definition  of  the  sphere  of  philosophy.  And  how  widely  the 
method  we  shall  follow,  and  the  results  at  which  we  shall 
arrive,  differ  from  the  method  and  conclusions  of  the 
immortal  thinker  of  Konigsberg,  should  appear  at  the  end 
rather  than  at  the  beginning  of  our  task.  But  when  Kant 
asserted,  "Human  reason  has  this  peculiar  fate,  that,  with 
reference  to  one  species  of  its  cognition,  it  is  always  burdened 
with  questions  which  it  cannot  cast  aside ;  for  they  are  given 
to  it  by  the  very  nature  of  reason  itself,  but  they  cannot  be 
answered  because  they  transcend  the  powers  of  reason, "  2  he 
indicated  beyond  question  for  all  time  the  sources  of  the 
epistemological  problem. 

The  history  of  reflective  thinking,  and  indeed  of  the 
literature  which  either  embodies,  or  is  tinged  by,  the  results 
of  reflective  thinking,  has  during  the  last  century  shown 
that  Kant  did  not  fully  realize  the  success  which  he  claimed 
for  his  critical  philosophy.  By  following  "the  secure  pro- 
cess of  science,"  in  his  "elaboration  of  the  cognitions  which 
belong  to  the  concern  of  reason,"  he  expected,  on  the  one 
hand,  forever  "to  deprive  speculative  reason  of  its  preten- 
sions to  transcendent  insights,"  and,  on  the  other  hand,  "to 
furnish  the  needed  preliminary  preparation  in  furtherance  of 


1  "  Philosophic  ist  die  Wissenschajl  und  Kritik  der  Erkenntniss,"  says  Riehl,  — 
Der  Philosophische  Kriticismus,  iii.  p.  15. 

2  Opening  sentence  of  the  Preface  to  the  first  edition  of  the  Kritik  der  reinen 
Vernunft. 


THE   PROBLEM  9 

a  fundamental  metaphysics  in  scientific  form. " 1  But,  strange 
to  say,  Kant's  destructive  effort  was  followed  in  history  by 
the  erection  of  systems  of  metaphysics  which  made,  above 
all  others  since  man  began  to  think,  the  most  enormous 
"pretensions  to  transcendent  insights;"  while  his  positive 
intent  has  left  behind  few  traces  of  accepted  metaphysical 
science.  It  is  the  sceptical  and  agnostic  conclusions  as  to 
the  cognitions  of  reason  which  so-called  neo-Kantians 
accept.  The  determination  and  defence  of  the  subjective 
origin  and  the  objective  reference  of  the  "categories,"  and 
the  rationalized  faith  of  Kant  in  the  postulates  of  the 
practical  reason  are  accepted,  when  accepted  at  all,  by  quite 
other  schools  of  thinkers  than  those  commonly  called  by  his 
name. 

It  is  not  the  chief  interest  at  present,  however,  to  define 
epistemological  truth  with  reference  to  the  author  of  the 
modern  critical  doctrine  of  knowledge.  It  is  rather  the 
purpose  to  point  out  that  the  origin,  nature,  and  importance 
of  that  problem  which  knowledge,  with  its  essential  objec- 
tive implicates,  offers  to  the  knowing  subject,  have  in  some 
sort  been  settled  once  for  all  by  the  critical  work  of  Kant. 
The  human  mind,  by  virtue  of  its  necessary  and  constitu- 
tional way  of  functioning  in  all  its  cognitive  acts,  contains 
at  once  the  proposal  and  the  answer,  if  answer  there  be,  to 
_Jthe__problem.  Neither  the  biological  and  anthropological, 
nor  even  the  distinctively  psychological  study  of  the  nature 
and  growth  of  man's  mind  will  avail  fully  to  explicate  or  to 
answer  the  epistemological  inquiry.  The  rather  is  this, 
fundamentally  considered,  a  philosophical  problem.  And 
it  is  inextricably  intermingled  with  the  problem  of  the 
Nature  of  Reality,  as  this  conception  of  reality  is  ap- 
plied both  to  the  mind  of  man  and  to  the  object  of  his 
knowledge. 

It  will  appear  as  an  opinion  for  which  we  shall  constantly 

1  Preface  to  the  second  edition  of  the  Kritik  der  reinen  Vernunft. 


10  THE  PROBLEM 

contend  that  the  problem  of  knowledge  cannot  be  properly 
stated,  much  less  satisfactorily  discussed,  without  unceas- 
ing reference  to  the  conclusions  of  a  scientific  psychology. 
The  reference  must  even  be  a  deference.  The  point  of  start- 
ing must  be  psychological.  Epistemological  discussion 
must  begin  by  understanding  analytically  the  actual,  con- 
crete content  of  consciousness.  But  the  consciousness  which 
enfolds  the  problem,  and  which  must  be  analyzed,  and  so 
far  as  possible  understood  in  order  to  the  best  mastery  of  the 
problem,  is  a  developed  human  consciousness.  It  is  the 
consciousness  of  a  being  who  has  already  become  appercep- 
tive  and  self-conscious.  It  is  not,  therefore,  an  animal 
consciousness;  nor  is  it  an  inchoate  and  beginning  human 
consciousness.  The  study  of  the  psychological  origin  and 
growth  of  knowledge  is,  indeed,  a  valuable  contribution 
toward  apprehending  and  solving  the  philosophical  problem 
which  gives  rise  to  a  theory  of  knowledge.  But  inasmuch 
as  this  problem  is  given  in  processes  of  cognition  whose 
essential  characteristic  is  that  the  knowing  subject  already 
distinguishes  the  forms  of  his  cognition  from  the  forms  of 
existence  implicate  in  cognition,  and  either  naively  identi- 
fies the  two  or  raises  the  sceptical  question  about  their  iden- 
tification, psychological  study  is  not  in  itself  a  sufficient 
indication  or  instrument  for  its  solution.  The  more  dis- 
tinctively epistemological  problem  now  emerges;  the  criti- 
cal inquiry  is  raised  as  to  whether,  and  how  far,  the  forms 
of  cognition  coincide  with  the  forms  of  existence. 

The  fundamental  problem  of  the  philosophy  of  knowledge 
is,  then,  an  inquiry  into  the  relations  between  certain  states 
of  consciousness  and  what  we  conceive  of  as  "the  really 
existent. " l  But  at  this  point  a  reflective  study  of  human 
knowledge  reveals  the  fact  that  its  problem  is  already  inex- 
tricably interwoven  with  the  ontological  problem,  —  the  meta- 
physical inquiry,  in  the  more  restricted  meaning  of  the 

1  Compare  Hartmann,  Das  Grundproblem  der  Erkenntnisstheorie,  p.  v. 


THE  PROBLEM  11 

much-abused  word  "metaphysics."1  For  suppose  that  the 
two  spheres  be  distinguished  as  follows:  Epistemology,  or 
the  philosophy  of  knowledge,  deals  with  the  concept  of  the 
True;  and  Metaphysics,  or  the  philosophy  of  being,  deals 
with  the  concept  of  the  Real.  We  find  ourselves,  however, 
quite  unable  to  form  any  concept,  or  even  to  hold  in  con- 
sciousness the  most  shadowy  mental  picture,  of  what  men 
affirm,  with  genuine  conviction,  to  be  true,  without  impli- 
cating the  for-us-real  in  this  concept,  this  mental  image. 
On  the  other  hand,  no  meaning  can  be  given  to  the  word 
"real"  without  stating  a  judgment  as  to  what  is  considered 
true.  Yet  the  two  words  are  by  no  means  precisely  identi- 
cal. For  the  more  correct  usage  speaks  of  presentations  of 
sense,  of  images  of  recognitive  memory,  and  of  certified 
thoughts  about  things,  as  true ;  and  they  are  thus  distin- 
guished from  images  of  fancy  or  from  unverifiable  thoughts. 
But  men  speak  of  minds  and  things  as  real  —  meaning  thus 
to  imply  a  sort  of  existence  which  belongs  neither  to  the 
true  nor  to  the  false  mental  representations. 

We  have  already  (in  the  Preface)  stated  that  we  intend  to 
discuss  separately  the  epistemological  and  the  ontological 
problems.  About  the  order  and  the  method  of  these  two  dis- 
cussions something  will  be  said  later  on.  The  connection  of 
the  two —  intimate  and  inextricable  as  it  is  —  is  emphasized 
at  this  point  in  order  to  show  that  the  impulse  to  the  quest, 
which  it  is  proposed  in  subsequent  chapters  to  follow,  is 
indeed  set  fast  in  the  very  heart  of  human  reason.  To 
explicate  the  problem  of  knowledge,  it  is  necessary  to  search 
to  its  depths  the  mind  of  man.  To  solve  it  completely 
would  be  to  comprehend  and  expose  all  the  profoundest 
mysteries  of  his  mind.  And  not  only  this :  it  would  be,  as 
Kant  held,  to  prepare  the  way  for  a  systematic  and  defen- 
sible exposition  of  the  inmost  nature  of  Reality,  so  far 

1  Note  the  phrase  of  Riehl,  —  die  metaphysischen   Erkenntnissprobleme.     See 
Der  Thilosophische  Kriticismus,  Vorwort  to  Part  ii. 


12  THE  PROBLEM 

as  this  knowledge  comes  within  the  possible  grasp  of  our 
reason  itself.  But,  doubtless,  this  will  remain  for  a  long 
time  to  come  one  of  the  most  alluring  and  important,  yet 
difficult  tasks  of  philosophical  discipline.  And  one  thinker 
can  scarcely  hope  to  do  more  than  bear  a  small  portion  of 
the  burden  of  so  great  a  task.  There  will  probably  not 
arise  another  Copernicus  in  this  stellar  science  of  mind. 

Something  more  should  at  this  point  receive  at  least  a 
passing  notice.  It  would  not  be  surprising  if  a  critical 
inquiry  into  the  nature,  extent,  and  validity  of  knowledge 
should  bring  us,  at  various  points  along  its  course,  in  sight 
of,  if  not  into  closest  contact  with,  certain  important  con- 
cepts of  ethics  and  of  the  philosophy  of  religion.  It  will  be 
the  declared  purpose  and  fixed  rule  of  the  present  investiga- 
tion to  avoid  contested  ethical  and  religious  questions  as 
much  as  is  consistent  with  a  thorough  treatment  of  the 
epistemological  problem.  And  where  foresight  makes  con- 
tact inevitable,  we  shall  still  try  to  accomplish  our  task 
without  undue  influence  from  ethical  and  religious  preju- 
dices. But  it  should  be  remembered  that,  in  the  discussion 
of  all  the  problems  of  philosophy,  and  perhaps  in  the  discus- 
sion of  the  epistemological  problem  in  particular  (since 
over  it  the  forces  of  dogmatism  and  agnosticism,  of  extreme 
idealism  and  extreme  realism,  of  crude  evolutionism  and 
old-fashioned  theology,  come  to  a  sort  of  life-and-death 
struggle),  prejudices  are  not  likely  to  be  all  on  one  side. 
No  author  can  promise  more  than  we  are  ready  to  promise, 
—  namely,  to  do  the  best  that  in  him  lies.  And  if  it  should 
be  discovered  that  knowledge  cannot  be  divorced  from  faith 
or  separated  from  the  life  of  action  (from  conduct,  which  is 
the  sphere  of  ethics),  why !  whose  fault  will  it  be  that  this 
is  so  ?  Will  not  the  discovery  serve  to  make  the  unity  of 
man's  total  life,  and  its  oneness,  in  some  sort,  with  the 
Reality  of  the  Universe,  yet  more  undoubted  and  more 
comprehensive  ? 


THE  PROBLEM  13 

The  nature  and  extent  of  the  epistemological  problem, 
the  discussion  of  which  is  a  philosophy  of  knowledge,  can  be 
better  comprehended  only  by  emphasizing  certain  considera- 
tions somewhat  more  in  detail.  And  first  of  all  the  follow- 
ing consideration:  this  problem  is  the  most  primary  and 
fundamental,  in  the  sense  that  it  is  of  all  philosophical 
problems  the  most  free  from  the  influence  of  necessary  pre- 
liminary assumptions.  To  argue  it  is  as  near  as  the  human 
mind  can  come  to  presuppositionless  reflective  thinking. 
This  is,  in  part,  but  in  part  only,  what  Fichte  meant  by 
calling  his  critical  examination  of  the  primary  and  perma- 
nent content  of  consciousness  a  Wissenschaftslehre.  For  the 
same  reason  this  kind  of  philosophical  study  is  sometimes 
said  to  aim  at  a  "science  of  science."  All  the  particular 
sciences  necessarily  and  fitly  cherish  their  own  particular 
assumptions.  They  cannot  be  successfully  pursued,  or  even 
seriously  approached,  without  taking  for  granted  many 
important  principles  and  not  a  few  fundamental  entities. 
Some  of  these  principles  and  entities  are  assumptions  of  the 
most  ordinary  human  knowledge ;  others  are  presuppositions 
which  have  been  won  for  the  modern  student  by  the  re- 
searches of  the  past  along  different  scientific  lines.  For 
example,  chemistry  adopts  the  work-a-day  assumption  of  an 
extra-mentally  existent  matter,  which  is  capable  of  actual 
subdivision  into  parts  that  are  too  minute  to  affect  the 
senses,  and  that  can  therefore  never  have  their  existence 
verified  by  immediate  testimony  from  sensuous  observation. 
It  also  assumes  the  entity  called  an  "  atom, "  with  its  mar- 
vellous non-sensuous  characteristics  and  its  faithful  obe- 
dience to  the  law  of  equivalents.  In  common  with  all  the 
physical  sciences  it  assumes  the  capacity  of  the  human  mind 
to  arrive  at  the  truth  of  things,  to  bring  its  forms  of  mental 
representation  into  agreement  with  the  forms  of  the  actually 
existent.  All  the  particular  sciences  presuppose,  as  truths 
which  enable  them  to  be  "particular,"  the  extra-mental 


14  THE  PROBLEM 

validity  of  the  so-called  categories  of  time,  space,  relation, 
causation,  etc. 

Those  branches  of  philosophical  discipline  which  are 
called  metaphysics  of  ethics,  philosophy  of  art,  of  nature, 
and  of  religion,  as  well  as  of  rights  and  of  history,  have  a 
complicated  net-work  of  presuppositions,  which  is  the  very 
substance  of  what  holds  them  within  their  proper  bounds. 
The  actuality  of  the  existence  of  multitudes  of  men,  in  the 
present  and  through  the  past,  with  a  real  history  of  develop- 
ment, and  standing  in  a  great  variety  of  actual  relations  to 
nature  and  to  one  another,  is  taken  for  granted  in  the  very 
attempt  to  establish  a  philosophy  of  conduct;  while  any- 
thing approaching  a  philosophy  of  nature  receives  from  the 
hands  of  the  natural  sciences  a  vast  body  of  alleged,  and  not 
a  few  (we  venture  to  suspect)  of  only  conjectured,  principles 
and  entities,  which  become  the  necessary  presuppositions  of 
its  constructive  effort. 

But  with  the  philosophy  of  knowledge  the  case  is  not  the 
same.  It  at  once  and  distinctly  puts  all  the  above-mentioned 
assumptions  to  one  side.  They  may  be  true,  but  they  can- 
not be  adopted  from  the  beginning  by  a  critical  theory  of 
knowledge.  The  very  aim  of  this  theory  is  to  get  behind  and 
underneath  all  these  and  other  similar  assumptions.  And  if 
there  are  assumptions  back  of  which  the  mind  cannot  go, 

—  because  it  is  compelled  to  make  them  by  the  very  consti- 
tution of  its  own  most  sceptical  and  critical  life,  as  it  were, 

—  then   epistemological    inquiry   will    get    down   to    these 
assumptions  also  and  view  them  face  to  face,  in  calmness 
and  with  purified  and  sharpened  vision.     For  it  is  not  the 
nature  and  validity,  or  the  value,   of  this  or  that  class  of 
cognitions  with  which  the  philosophical  theory  of  knowledge 
aims  to  deal,  — it  is  the  cognitive  faculty  itself;  or,  to  state 
the  problem  in  more  abstract  and  objective   fashion,  it  is 
human   cognition   itself  which    is    the   subject    of   critical 
examination  in   every  attempt   at  an   epistemology.     This 


THE  PROBLEM  15 

inquiry  is,  therefore,  the  most  nearly  presuppositionless  of 
all  possible  inquiries.  It  assumes  nothing  but  the  one 
general  fact  in  which  all  individual  cognitions,  whether  so- 
called  scientific  or  not,  "live  and  move  and  have  their 
being,"  —  the  one  fact,  I  KNOW. 

It  soon  appears,  however,  as  analysis  and  reflective  study 
of  the  fact  of  knowledge  moves  forward  and  downward,  that 
this  fact  is  itself  no  simple  affair.  By  this  we  mean  some- 
thing more  than  that  "our  experience  is  an  extremely  com- 
plicated web  of  sensations  and  intellectual  elaboration  of 
sensations,  and  of  the  results  of  their  elaboration."  Locke 
would  have  had  little  doubt  to  throw  upon  a  statement  like 
this ;  and  even  less  doubt  would  have  proceeded  out  of  the 
mouth  of  the  great  sceptic  Hume.  The  successors  of  Locke 
in  France,  the  most  extreme  of  sensationalists  in  the  psychol- 
ogy of  to-day,  might  admit  as  much.  Modern  psychological 
analysis,  especially  of  the  experimental  type,  in  its  effort  to 
disentangle  the  "  web  "  of  experience,  has  thus  far  succeeded 
in  increasing  rather  than  diminishing  its  apparent  com- 
plexity. Even  the  most  presuppositionless  of  all  inquiries, 
then,  since  it  must  assume  the  fact  of  knowledge,  has  also 
to  assume  a  history  of  the  complication  of  sensations,  of  the 
intellectual  elaboration  of  sensations,  and  of  the  gathering 
of  the  results  of  their  elaboration.  That  is  to  say,  in  the 
very  reception  of  the  datum,  "I  know,"  the  assumption  of 
an  organization  of  experience  has  already,  of  necessity,  been 
made.  Nor  is  it  possible  to  get  back  of  this  process  of 
organization,  with  its  complex  results,  in  order,  freed  from 
its  influences,  to  examine  the  fact  of  knowledge. 

So  obvious  is  the  truth  to  which  attention  has  just  been 
called  that  its  statement  is  often  made  in  half-jocose  form. 
When  I  most  carefully  and  critically  examine  this  datum, 
"I  know,"  and  when  I  push  my  presuppositionless  and 
sceptical  inquiry  to  its  extremest  limits,  what  is  all  this 
but  a  going-round  in  an  endless  circle?  I  KNOW;  and  I 


16  THE  PROBLEM 

propose,  without  favorable  or  unfavorable  prejudice,  to  dis- 
tinguish the  ultimate  nature,  to  get  the  full  import,  and  to 
estimate  the  real  value  of  this  fact.  But  the  conduct  of  the 
examination  is  itself,  at  best,  only  a  series  of  similar  facts : 
"  I  know, "  and  again,  "  I  know, "  or  it  may  be,  "  I  do  not 
know."  But  this  last,  "I  do  not  know,"  is  only  another 
way  of  saying  I  know,  — at  least,  something,  namely,  that  I 
do  not  know.  At  its  best,  too,  the  result  of  critical  exami- 
nation is  itself  a  cognition,  which  lies  still  further  from  the 
certitude  of  envisagement  or  of  the  concrete  judgments  of 
daily  experience.  At  its  worst,  the  same  examination  ends 
in  a  series  of  opinions,  which  are  far  enough  from  laying 
claim  to  be  any  kind  of  knowledge. 

Put  into  more  serious  philosophical  form,  the  dilemma 
may  be  stated  in  something  like  the  following  way.  A  fun- 
damental critique  of  the  faculty  of  cognition  is  now  proposed ; 
but  if  this  critique  is  really  to  be  fundamental,  it  must  be  free 
from  all  the  assumptions  which  belong  to  any  of  the  special 
systems  of  cognitions,  the  sciences  so-called.  Theory  of 
knowledge  aims  to  be  presuppositionless,  to  have  no  assump- 
tions beyond  the  one  primary  datum  of  my  knowledge. 
In  studying  the  data  of  actual  cognitions,  however,  so  as  thus 
to  frame  a  critique  of  the  faculty  of  cognition  which  shall 
be  based  upon  the  facts,  I  am  always  using  this  same  faculty. 
Hegel  thus  accused  Kant  of  allowing  to  creep  in  "  the  mis- 
conception of  already  knowing  before  you  know,  —  the  error 
of  refusing  to  enter  the  water  until  you  have  learned  to  swim. " 
And  Lotze  compares  those  who  spend  their  strength  upon  a 
theory  of  knowledge  to  men  constantly  whetting  the  knife, 
and  feeling  its  edge  to  see  if  it  will  cut ;  or  to  an  orchestra 
which  is  forever  tuning  its  instruments  and  still  wondering 
if  they  can  play  in  tune. 

To  objectors  in  general,  we  shall  either  propose  our 
answer  in  due  time,  or  else  conclude  that  a  much  needed 
work  will  be  better  done  if  they  are  silently  passed  by. 


THE  PROBLEM  17 

Two  things  are  enough  to  say  at  present.  Of  these  the  first 
is  this :  if  the  critical  theory  of  knowledge  must  be  satisfied 
with  a  completely  sceptical  or  agnostic  outcome,  then  all 
human  science  is  but  consistent  dreaming,  at  its  best.  For 
the  very  guarantee  of  truth  which  consistency  gives  is  itself 
dependent  upon  trust  in  the  constitution  of  reason.  But, 
second,  the  absurdity  of  an  utterly  presuppositionless  cri- 
tique of  reason  must  be  acknowledged  at  the  very  beginning 
of  every  epistemological  inquiry.  All  reflective  thinking 
upon  this  class  of  problems  must  be  content  to  move  within 
the  inevitable  circle.  The  human  mind  cannot  contemplate 
itself  from  an  outside  point  of  view,  as  it  were.  It  must 
accept  at  its  own  hands  the  terms  upon  which  it  will  under- 
take and  complete  its  task  of  self-understanding. 

Here,  then,  we  get  the  first  strong  intimation  of  charac- 
teristic difficulties  besetting  the  path  which  must  necessarily 
be  followed  in  the  attempt  to  investigate  with  critical  thor- 
oughness the  philosophical  problem  of  knowledge.  Nothing, 
we  assure  ourselves  with  encouraging  confidence,  must  be 
taken  for  granted,  beyond  the  ultimate  and  indisputable  datum 
of  all  science,  —  the  fact,  above  or  behind  or  beneath  which 
no  one  can  go.  This  is  the  datum  and  the  fact  of  knowledge 
itself.  But  surely  this  datum  must  be  received  as  being  all 
that  it  in  fact  is ;  this  fact  must  be  held  for  all  that  it,  as 
conscious  datum,  is  worth.  This  is  to  say  that  a  philo- 
sophical theory  of  knowledge  must  deal  with  the  whole 
circumference,  as  it  were,  and  with  the  most  intimate  and 
inclusive  significance,  of  the  psychological  process  of  cogni- 
tion. Criticism  must  accept,  as  its  problem,  cognition  includ- 
ing all  its  necessary  implicates.  What  is  it  to  know,  in 
respect  of  all  that  knowledge  is,  of  all  that  knowledge  guar- 
antees, and  of  all  that  it  necessarily  implicates  ?  It  is  in 
the  primary  fact  of  cognition,  when  critically  regarded,  that 
we  find  the  sources  of  the  possible  forms  of  conclusion  con- 
cerning the  true  philosophical  theory  of  knowledge.  The 

2 


18  THE  PROBLEM 

permanent  sources  of  philosophical  scepticism  and  agnosti- 
cism exist  in  the  incontestable  fact  that  all  knowledge  is 
subjective;  that,  proximately  considered,  it  is  a  conscious 
process  in  time,  a  mental  state  which  arises  and  then  passes 
away.  Moreover,  one  of  the  first  discoveries  which  criti- 
cism makes  is  the  truth,  also  incontestable,  that  the  laws 
of  the  knowing  faculty,  and  so  the  limits  of  knowledge,  are 
firmly  set  in  the  constitution  and  characteristic  development 
of  the  cognitive  subject.  Human  cognition,  therefore,  con- 
tains in  its  own  nature  a  standing  warning,  and  even  a  vin- 
dication of  the  necessity  for  doubt  of  the  most  fundamental 
sort.  It  issues  a  perpetual  call  to  those  self-searchings 
which  lead  into  a  theoretical  reconstruction  of  our  concept 
of  knowledge. 

Equally  certain  is  it,  however,  that  the  sources  from 
which  must  come  the  healing  of  the  wounds  which  reason 
receives  at  her  own  hands  are  with  reason  herself.  The 
primary  datum  of  cognition  contains  within  itself  the  cor- 
rective of  agnosticism,  the  chastening  of  raw  and  unbridled 
scepticism ;  or  else  no  such  corrective  and  no  such  chasten- 
ing are  anywhere  to  be  found.  The  sources  of  a  philosophy 
of  knowledge  and  of  a  trustworthy  metaphysics  also  exist, 
inexhaustible,  in  the  incontestable  fact  that  knowledge  is 
fnms-subjective,  and,  in  its  very  nature,  implicates  existence 
beyond  the  process  of  knowledge ;  that  cognition  itself  guar- 
antees the  extra-mental  being  of  that  which,  by  the  very 
nature  of  this  process  the  cognitive  subject  is  compelled 
to  recognize  as  not  identical  with  its  own  present  state. 
Thus  the  most  primary  problem  of  epistemology  becomes  a 
concern  of  reason  with  the  ultimate,  the  unanalyzable  and 
irreducible  momenta  and  principles  of  objective  cognition.1 
The  further  advance  of  this  concernment  may  be  described 
as  reason  becoming  more  self-conscious  in  the  way  of  bring- 
ing to  its  own  recognition  what  is  implicate  in  conscious- 
ness as  objective. 

1  Compare  Volkelt,  Erfahrung  trad  Denken,  p.  35. 


THE  PROBLEM  19 

Mere  recognition  of  the  implicates  of  cognition  is  not  in 
itself,  however,  enough  to  satisfy  all  the  demands  made 
by  the  self-searching  and  critical  activity  of  man's  mind. 
These  implicates  must  themselves  be  made  the  matter  of  a 
further  concern  of  reason.  Suppose,  for  example,  that  I 
have  come  to  a  consciousness  of  what  is  involved  in  saying, 
"  I  know  "  —  any  simplest  truth  of  fact  or  of  a  physical  law ; 
such  as  that  the  chair  is  over  yonder,  or  that  the  force  of 
gravity  varies  inversely  as  the  square  of  the  distance  and 
directly  as  the  mass  of  the  two  bodies  taking  part  in  that 
transaction  which  reveals  the  existence  of  this  force.  Here, 
as  in  every  act  of  knowledge,  are  two  classes  of  implicates. 
One  of  these  is  the  implied  control  of  consciousness  by 
what  are  called  the  "laws  of  the  mind."  It  is  an  invin- 
cible persuasion,  belief  —  use  what  word  you  will,  if  you 
do  not  like  the  term  "  rational  assumption  "  —  of  all  men 
that  truth  is  somehow  to  be  attained  by  the  mind.  This 
is  the  indestructible  self-confidence  of  human  reason.  Dis- 
appoint her  as  often  as  you  may,  deceive  her  as  badly  as 
you  can,  accuse  her  of  unlimited  audacity  in  enterprises 
that  concern  what  appears  to  transcend  her  powers,  and 
yet  you  can  never  wholly  destroy  her  self-confidence.  So 
often  as  she  falls,  she  rises  again  and  makes  once  more  the 
persistent  effort  to  stand  and  to  walk  alone.  Or  in  her  more 
pious  moods,  if  much  chastened  by  rebukes  for  her  many 
errors,  she  still  "trusts  in  God  and  is  not  confounded." 

This  trust  of  reason  in  herself,  which  is  always  at  least  a 
silent  and  concealed  postulate  of  all  her  distrust,  itself  needs 
critical  investigation;  in  order,  to  drop  the  figure  of  speech, 
that  the  mental  principles  of  those  processes  of  knowledge 
which  all  involve  the  persuasion,  or  the  conviction  of  knowl- 
edge, may  themselves  be  criticised  in  detail.  Certainly  we 
shall  not  by  the  critical  method  escape  the  necessity  of 
using  and  of  trusting  these  principles;  nor  shall  we  succeed 
in  establishing  their  claims  in  a  more  fundamental  way  by 


20  THE  PROBLEM 

smart  and  consecutive  dialectic  and  trains  of  argument. 
Something  better  than  merely  this,  however,  may  be  hoped 
for,  which  it  is  by  all  means  necessary  to  attempt,  and 
which  is  not  without  a  certain  large  positive  value.  We 
may  hope  to  bring  to  light  the  truer  meaning  of  these  forms 
of  the  constitution  of  mind,  these  ways  of  the  functioning 
of  all  human  reason.  Moreover,  since  there  is  no  little 
apparent  conflict  among  these  principles,  as  well  as  vague- 
ness and  uncertainty  respecting  the  best  ways  of  stating  each 
of  them,  we  may  attempt  to  effect  something  in  the  interests 
of  harmony  and  clearness.  The  doctrine  of  irreconcilable 
conflict,  of  fundamental  and  irremovable  "antinomies"  of 
intellect  so-called,  is  favorite  with  many  acute  students  of 
the  mental  life.  This  doctrine,  in  itself  so  distasteful  or 
even  abhorrent  and  frightful  to  the  higher  interests  of  ethics 
and  religion  as  some  conceive  it  to  be,  certainly  requires 
perpetual  re-examination.  To  speak  technically,  the  critical 
and  "reconciling"  discussion  of  the  "categories"  is  an 
important  problem  for  the  student  of  epistemology.  And 
when  he  is  incontinently  and  even  coarsely  accused  of  foster- 
ing scepticism  and  agnosticism,  of  emasculating  a  sturdy 
and  effective  manhood  by  calling  in  question  its  most  fun- 
damental faiths,  he  may  answer :  "  Nay,  not  so ;  for  no  faith 
can  lay  claim  to  be  fundamental,  or  to  contribute  to  a  sturdy 
and  effective  manhood,  which  cannot  submit  itself  to  the 
freest  criticism." 

To-day  and  throughout  all  history,  the  struggle  of  a  posi- 
tive and  critical  philosophy  with  scepticism  and  agnosticism 
over  a  theory  of  knowledge  is  a  life-and-death  struggle. 
War  to  the  knife  is  already  declared  between  the  two.  He 
is  the  emasculator  of  reason,  the  effeminate  student  of  the 
mind's  life,  who  would  deprive  us  of  the  power  to  answer 
ever  anew  the  call:  "Let  the  thinker  arouse  himself  and 
respond  to  the  demand  to  give  reasons  for  the  faith  that  is 
in  him,  by  an  effort  at  improved  self-knowledge."  But 


THE  PROBLEM  21 

surely  self-knowledge  cannot  be  improved,  or  made  true 
knowledge  of  Self,  unless  we  look  below  the  superficial  area 
of  particular  cognitions  and  undertake  to  validate  tbe  prin- 
ciples of  all  cognition.  Surely  it  is  no  less  true  now  than  it 
was  in  mediaeval  times,  when  the  principle  of  authority  was 
wellnigh  universal  in  its  sway,  that  the  friends  of  human 
reason  are  not  those  who  refuse  to  have  its  claims  examined. 
What  higher  principle  of  truth  can  there  be  than  this:  That 
must  be  true  which  is  so  connected  with  the  knowing  sub- 
ject that  he  must  either  relinquish  all  claim  to  any  kind  of 
knowledge  or  else  assume  the  same  to  be  true  ?  What  is 
actually  thus  connected  with  the  knowing  subject  can  only 
appear  as  the  result  of  a  critical  investigation  into  the  fun- 
damental laws  of  the  mental  life  in  its  acts  of  cognition. 
For  the  theory  of  knowledge  must  be  a  theory  of  certainty. 

But  the  process  of  thinking  may  conform,  at  least  in  cer- 
tain respects,  to  logical  laws  without  putting  the  thinker  in 
possession  of  material  truth.  Whether  an  agreement  of  the 
total  activity  of  knowledge  with  all  the  formal  laws  of  intel- 
lect would  unfailingly  guarantee  the  truth  is  a  question  which 
need  not  be  raised  at  present.  Certainly,  neither  what  is 
called  ordinary  knowledge,  nor  what  is  called  science,  con- 
sists simply  in  weaving  into  a  consistent  totality  a  number 
of  universal  and  necessary  laws.  A  critical  analysis  will 
establish  the  conclusion  that  thinking  alone  —  the  pure  dia- 
lectical process,  mere  thinking,  if  that  were  possible  —  can- 
not produce  a  certified  experience  of  Reality  or  a  sure  convic- 
tion as  to  the  essential  and  unchanging  nature  of  Reality. 
This  truth  emphasizes  the  necessity  of  extending  still  further 
the  problem  of  the  epistemological  branch  of  philosophy. 
Besides  the  formal  laws  of  intellect,  another  class  of  impli- 
cates is  found  in  every  act  of  cognition,  and  furnishes  a 
demand  for  more  detailed  examination.  These  are  impli- 
cates of  beings,  of  entities,  of  the  really  existent.  The 
exercise  of  "metaphysical  instinct,"  if  we  may  for  the 


22  THE  PROBLEM 

moment  employ  such  a  term,  is  an  indispensable  form  of 
functioning  in  every  act  of  cognition.  To  know  is  to  make 
an  ontological  leap,  a  spring  from  the  charmed  circle  of 
pure  subjectivity  into  the  mystery  of  the  real.  This  in- 
stinctive metaphysics  maintains  its  inexorable  rule  over 
the  human  mind,  in  spite  of  all  sceptical  inquiry;  and  just 
as  inexorably  after  we  have  adopted  the  agnostic  view 
regarding  the  validity  of  human  knowledge,  or  the  most 
extremely  idealistic  theory  of  the  nature  of  experience,  as 
before.  But  in  its  uncritical  and  instinctive  form  it  is 
neither  theoretically  nor  practically  satisfying.  There  must 
be  substituted  for  this  uncritical  metaphysics  some  postu- 
late, thoughtfully  wrought  out,  which  will  show  how  the 
contents  of  developed  and  carefully  guarded  human  con- 
sciousness may  be  true  and  valid  representations  of  actual 
transactions  in  the  world  of  reality. 

The  detailed  critical  discussion  of  those  conceptions  which 
fall  under  the  general  concept  of  Reality  constitutes  the 
peculiar  field  of  metaphysics  proper.  This  field,  in  not  a 
few  places,  overlays  the  field  of  epistemology.  The  path 
by  which  both  fields  are  reached  follows  the  same  method, 
—  beginning  in  psychological  science  and  continuing  by 
reflective  thinking  upon  the  problems  which  this  science, 
as  applied  to  the  presuppositions  of  all  the  other  sciences, 
brings  to  our  view.  Some  adjustment  of  our  examination 
into  the  problem  of  knowledge,  so  as  to  make  it  fit  in  with 
conclusions  that  belong  to  the  problem  of  being,  seems  not 
only  desirable  but  even  indispensable.  Otherwise  the  criti- 
cism of  man's  cognitive  faculty  must  inevitably  fall  into  one 
of  two  extremes.  To  assume,  uncritically,  that  the  forms  of 
our  conscious  life  —  our  representations  of  sense,  our  trains 
of  associated  ideas,  and  even  our  connected  thoughts  — 
necessarily  correspond  with  the  actual  transactions  of  the 
real  world,  whether  we  make  the  assumption  according  to 
the  plain  man's  "  common-sense  "  or  in  the  more  elaborate 


THE  PROBLEM  23 

forms  of  so-called  "scientific  realism,"  is  to  leave  the  prob- 
lem of  knowledge  unattempted  at  one  of  its  most  important 
and  even  vital  points. 

On  the  other  hand,  agreement  in  some  sort  and  to  some 
extent  between  the  forms  of  human  consciousness  and  the 
real  beings  and  actual  transactions  of  the  world  outlying  the 
individual's  immediate  experience,  is  an  assumption  from 
which  we  can  never  set  free  the  critique  of  reason  itself. 
Uncritical  faith  and  dogmatic  agnosticism  are  both  unphilo- 
sophical.  The  actual  condition  of  thought  and  things  in 
every  process  of  knowing,  and  the  indications  which  the 
critical  study  of  the  process  offers  respecting  the  real  rela- 
tions of  thought  and  things,  become  then  a  problem  for 
further  examination.  The  apparent  contradictions  which 
the  epistemological  problem  contains  cannot  contentedly  be 
left  in  the  uncriticised  and  unsettled  position  in  which 
naive  consciousness  finds  them.  To  leave  them  thus  would 
be  to  confess  that  knowledge  is  no  knowledge,  and  that  our 
most  essential  activities  are  self-stultifying. 

But  further  pursuit  of  such  considerations  as  the  foregoing 
must  be  left  to  the  attempted  solution  of  the  problems  which 
a  philosophy  of  knowledge  propounds.  Enough  has  been 
said  to  show  how  it  is  that  epistemology  undertakes,  as  its 
important  and  difficult  task,  to  discover,  to  expound  criti- 
cally, and  to  defend  both  circumstantially  and  by  harmoniz- 
ing them  with  each  other,  the  implicates  of  every  act  of 
knowledge.  This  is  also  its  chief  theoretical  interest. 

The  method  which  must  be  pursued  in  any  partially  suc- 
cessful attempt  to  form  a  philosophical  theory  of  knowledge 
has  already  been  indicated.  A  few  words  are  needed,  how- 
ever, to  make  this  indication  clearer.  In  the  study  of  the 
epistemological  problem,  as  in  the  study  of  all  philosophical 
problems,  psychology  stands  in  the  relation  of  a  propaedeutic. 
It  is  this  science  alone  which,  when  appealed  to  in  faithful 
and  unprejudiced  fashion,  can  put  us  into  possession  of 


24  THE  PROBLEM 

those  concrete  and  indisputable  facts  of  experience  wherein 
the  philosophical  problem  has  its  origin.  The  inquirer  who 
is  defective  or  slovenly  in  his  analysis  of  psychological  fact, 
of  the  concrete  and  feeling-full  life  of  the  human  mind,  will 
surely  fail  even  to  grasp  the  significance  of  the  problem  of 
knowledge.  He  certainly  can  never  have  in  hand  the  data 
for  helping  to  make  more  satisfactory  the  attempt  at  its 
answer.  And  the  epistemology  which  despises  or  neglects 
the  assistance  of  psychological  science  will  either  mistake 
the  real  nature  of  its  mission,  or  else  its  entire  view  and 
attempted  solution  will  be  ghostly,  —  an  unsubstantial  image 
suspended  in  thin  mid-air.  The  successful  critic  of  human 
cognition  must  have  penetrated  and  resided  long  within  the 
theatre  where  the  factors  of  the  conscious  and  self-conscious 
life  are  enacting  their  varied  drama  upon  the  mind's  stage. 
Nor  will  it  suffice  for  this  that  he  shall  have  merely 
studied  the  logic  of  the  actor.  For,  as  we  shall  see  in  de- 
tail subsequently,  human  knowledge  is  not  merely  a  logical 
affair. 

His  despite  of  psychology,  as  well  as  the  forlorn  condition 
of  the  science  in  his  day,  and  his  over-credulous  acceptance 
of  the  logical  schemata  of  Aristotle  in  the  attempt  to  esti- 
mate the  constitution,  the  presuppositions,  and  the  limits 
of  human  cognition,  had  an  evil  influence  upon  even  the 
"astounding  Kant."  It  was  chiefly  the  rigid  maintenance 
of  the  purely  conceptual  points  of  view,  the  treatment  of 
the  categories,  or  forms  of  the  functioning  of  judgment,  as 
merely  formal,  which  led  irresistibly  to  the  sceptical  and 
agnostic  outcome  of  the  "Critique  of  Pure  Reason."  But 
Kant's  abandonment  of  the  merely  formal  points  of  view, 
in  the  other  two  Critiques,  came  too  late  to  secure  our  re- 
spect and  adherence  for  the  class  of  objects  with  which  these 
works  attempt  to  deal.  A  more  comprehensive  and  truer 
psychology  would  have  shown  the  author  that  it  is  not  a 
question  of  pure  knowledge  here  and  of  pure  faith  over  yon- 


THE  PROBLEM  25 

der ;  of  objective  cognition  free  from  doubtful  postulates  in 
the  case  of  sensuous  objects,  and  of  practical  trust  without 
intuitive  data  in  the  case  of  so-called  transcendent  objects. 
It  would  possibly  have  guarded  this  great  philosopher  — 
above  ail  others  acute  as  a  reflective  analyzer  of  the  formal 
presuppositions  of  reason  —  from  claiming,  in  the  interests 
of  a  harmonious  apriorism,  to  have  "knowledge  "  in  so  many 
places  where  no  knowledge  is;  as  well  as  from  denying 
knowledge  in  certain  other  places  where  its  claim  to  ex- 
istence may  well  enough  be  maintained.  For  surely  the 
Kantian  "  ideas  of  pure  reason "  have  as  good  title  to 
objective  validity  as  have  many  of  the  "concepts  of  pure 
understanding. "  The  real  unity  of  the  soul  is,  at  worst,  as 
much  known  as  is  the  objective  verity  of  the  principle  of 
causation  in  physics,  or  — to  take  another  instance  —  of  the 
principle  of  reciprocity.  Certain  judgments  to  which  Kant 
gives  a  priori  and  objective  authority,  as  "making  a  pure 
science  of  physics  "  possible,  are  no.  more  entitled  to  this 
distinction  than  are  many  of  the  theological  judgments 
which  he  relegates  to  the  limbo  of  dead  metaphysical 
speculations. 

We  have  dwelt  upon  the  example  of  Kant  in  order  to 
show  that  metaphysical  acumen  and  power  in  reflective 
analysis,  however  surpassing,  will  not  serve  one  to  the  best 
advantage  in  the  study  of  the  problem  of  knowledge,  unless 
these  qualities  be  employed  upon  a  sound  and  broad  basis 
of  psychological  fact.  But,  on  the  other  hand,  the  mere 
student  of  psychology  (especially  of  the  purely  experimental 
type)  cannot  grasp,  much  less  satisfactorily  solve,  the  diffi- 
culties inherent  in  a  philosophical  theory  of  knowledge. 
For  the  method  of  stating  and  of  handling  the  epistemo- 
logical  problem  must  be  something  more  than  descriptive 
and  experimental.  The  peculiar  discursive  analysis  which 
philosophy  habitually  employs  must  unfold  the  presupposi- 
tions that  lie  implicate  in  the  facts  of  cognition.  It  must 


26  THE  PROBLEM 

also  be  persistently  and   systematically  used   in  order  to 
attain  a  consistent  and  harmonious  theory. 

Upon  one  point  affecting  the  method  of  epistemology  a 
further  word  needs  to  be  said.  "We  have  seen  that  the  prob- 
lem of  knowledge  is  in  its  very  nature  such  as  to  involve 
metaphysical  discussion  in  the  narrower  meaning  of  the  word 
"  metaphysics : "  that  is  to  say,  it  is  impossible  to  discuss 
this  problem  without  introducing  the  influence  of  one's  posi- 
tions respecting  the  ultimate  questions  in  ontology.  Accord- 
ingly a  dispute  has  for  some  time  been  rife  over  the  inquiry, 
"Which  of  the  two  logically  precedes  the  other  in  a  philo- 
sophical system  ?  "  The  answer  of  Kant  to  this  inquiry  was 
not  equivocal.  He  held  that  to  attempt  a  system  of  meta- 
physics, or  even  to  discuss  any  of  the  great  metaphysical 
problems,  previous  to  a  critique  of  reason  itself,  was  mis- 
chievous and  absurd.  On  the  other  hand,  not  a  few  would 
agree  with  Paulsen1  in  recommending,  or  insisting  upon, 
the  opposite  order.  We  have  expressed  our  opinion  as  to 
the  merits  of  the  question  of  method  elsewhere.2  The  his- 
torical order  coincides  with  that  which  is  advocated  by  those 
who  oppose  Kant  upon  this  point.  The  logical  order,  on 
the  contrary,  is  the  one  advocated  so  earnestly  by  Kant  him- 
self. The  two  classes  of  problems,  and  the  two  branches 
of  philosophical  discipline  which  cultivate  them,  cannot  be 
kept  apart.  When  historically  considered  they  will  be,  and 
when  logically  considered  they  cannot  help  being,  cultivated 
in  their  relations  of  mutual  dependence.  But  it  does  not 
follow,  because  the  historical  order  favors  the  view  of 
Paulsen,  that  the  more  logical  order  may  not  be  entitled 
at  some  time  in  the  development  of  reflective  thinking 
to  displace  the  historical.  We  can  see  no  serious  objec- 
tion to  allowing  any  author  to  follow  his  own  inclinations 
or  convenience  in  arranging  this  point  in  the  method  of 

1  Introduction  to  Philosophy,  pp.  340  f. 

2  See  the  author's  Introduction  to  Philosophy,  pp.  178  f. 


THE  PROBLEM  27 

treatment  given  to  the  connected  epistemological  and  onto- 
logical  problems. 

As  concerns  the  purpose  and  the  method  of  this  treatise, 
therefore,  all  that  it  is  now  necessary  to  say  may  be  sum- 
marized as  follows.  We  propose  a  philosophical  criticism  of 
knowledge,  with  a  view  to  point  out  its  origin  and  nature  as 
implicating  reality;  to  validate  it  by  reducing  to  their  sim- 
plest terms  and  arranging  in  a  harmonious  whole  its  necessary 
forms,  its  assumptions,  and  its  postulates;  and  to  mark  out 
its  limits  by  further  criticism  and  especially  by  distinguishing 
the  sources  and  kinds  of  error  and  of  half-truth.  This  is  the 
task  belonging  to  epistemology,  or  the  theory  of  knowledge. 
We  shall  go  for  our  facts  to  psychology,  to  the  descriptive 
and  explanatory  science  of  those  mental  processes  which  are 
called  "knowledge,"  and  of  that  mental  development  which 
is  called  "growth  of  knowledge."  We  shall  subject  these 
facts  to  a  thorough  reflective  analysis;  and  we  shall  use 
what  speculative  skill  we  can  command  to  set  our  results 
into  relation  with  sound  conclusions  on  the  other  great 
problems  of  philosophy. 

To  any  who  question  the  importance  or  doubt  the  benefit 
of  such  a  study  as  that  here  proposed,  a  few  words  will 
suffice.  There  can  be  no  doubt  about  the  existence  in  culti- 
vated and  thoughtful  circles  of  a  vast  amount  of  scepticism 
which  has  led  many  minds  either  to  a  self-confident  dogmatic 
agnosticism  or  to  a  pathetic  despair  of  knowledge.  These 
mental  attitudes  are,  of  course,  especially  obvious  toward 
the  transcendent  objects  which  have  always  commanded  the 
assent  of  the  great  majority  of  thinkers  upon  ethics  and 
religion.  But  the  agnostic  or  despairing  attitude  toward  the 
problem  of  knowledge  itself  lies,  both  logically  and  in  fact, 
at  the  base  of  all  other  agnosticism  and  of  manifold  forms 
of  despair.  The  history  of  mental  development  shows  that, 
in  order  to  set  free  the  forces  of  thinking  for  positive  and 
fruitful  activity,  there  is  nothing  against  which  we  need 


28  THE  PROBLEM 

to  guard  ourselves  more  carefully  than  the  haste  with  which 
the  most  important  and  fundamental  conceptions  of  the 
intellect  are  permitted  to  lose  their  absolute  significance 
for  the  cognition  of  the  being  and  the  connections  of  the 
real  world.  Witness  the  cheap  and  easy-going  fashion  with 
which  the  sceptical  and  agnostic  outcome  of  the  Kantian 
critical  system  gets  itself  accepted  on  every  side.  And  this 
oftenest  comes  about  without  serious  effort  to  understand 
Kant  aright;  and  with  even  less  sympathy  with  the  effort 
which  led  him  to  undertake  the  critique  of  reason,  —  the 
effort,  namely,  to  save  the  ethical  and  religious  postulates 
from  the  attacks  of  the  speculative  reason. 

For  souls  who  take  themselves  seriously  and  who  enter 
in  earnest  upon  the  exploration  of  reason,  if  they  become 
tired,  discouraged,  or  misled,  there  is  no  permanent  cure 
but  that  which  it  lies  in  the  hands  of  reason,  with  a  pro- 
founder  and  richer  understanding  of  her  own  self  and  her  own 
resources,  to  accomplish.  And  they  do  not  catch  the  true 
voice  of  the  Zeitgeist  who  cannot  hear  and  interpret  it  as  a 
call.  It  is  a  call  for  a  stronger  and  sweeter  word  of  healing, 
spoken  in  the  name  of  reason  to  soothe  the  sufferings  and  re- 
move the  scars  which  have  been  inflicted  in  her  own  name. 

Nor  is  this  mental  attitude  and  its  accompanying  tone  of 
the  emotional  and  practical  life  confined  by  any  means  to 
those  who  have  reflected  upon  the  criticism  of  the  categories. 
There  are  thousands  of  plain  men  and  women  who  do  not 
so  much  as  know  whether  there  be  any  critical  philosophy, 
and  who  have  scarcely  even  heard  the  name  of  Kant,  but 
who  are  profoundly  influenced  by  the  streams  of  think- 
ing of  which  that  masterful  mind  is  the  principal  modern 
philosophical  source.  They,  too,  are  ready  to  join  the 
complaint:  — 

"  There  was  the  Door  to  which  I  found  no  key ; 
There  was  the  Veil  through  which  I  could  not  see : 

Some  little  talk  awhile  of  ME-and-THEK 
There  was  —  and  then  no  more  of  THEE  and  ME." 


THE  PROBLEM  29 

And  the  chances,  as  the  history  of  humanity  abundantly 
shows,  are  not  altogether  against  their  coming  soon  to  add 
to  complaint  this  teaching  of  experience :  — 

"  Then  to  the  lip  of  this  poor  earthen  Urn 
I  lean'd  the  Secret  of  my  Life  to  learn  : 

And  lip  to  lip  it  murmur'd  —  '  While  you  live, 
Drink !  —  for,  once  dead,  you  never  shall  return.'  " 

Now  we  cannot  believe  that  it  is  matter  of  small  impor- 
tance whether  or  not  any  helpful  word  is  spoken  to  those 
who  are  asking  of  reason  a  contribution  to  her  own  better 
self-understanding.  And  if,  as  has  always  happened,  this 
word,  when  first  spoken  to  more  serious  students,  should 
filter  downward  and  outward  through  the  currents  of  popular 
opinion  and  popular  impression,  it  might  strengthen  and 
sweeten  the  daily  life  of  some  of  these  "plain  men  and 
women."  At  any  rate,  here  is  a  task  worth  trying.  For 
the  critical  study  of  cognition  is  essentially  an  effort  to 
make  the  total  of  our  human  life  more  dignified  and  better 
worth  the  living.  It  is  an  effort  to  heighten  our  rational 
estimate  of  the  calling  and  the  destiny  of  man.  Scant 
respect  is  due  that  doctor  in  psychology  who,  when  his 
patient  comes  to  him  heart-sick  and  brain-confused,  either 
makes  light  of  his  ills  or  sends  him  to  the  nearest  apothe- 
cary's shop,  with  orders  to  put  himself  to  sleep  by  taking  as 
much  crude  opium  as  some  unskilled  hand  may  choose  to 
measure  out  for  him.  And,  surely,  that  teacher  of  phi- 
losophy has  either  mistaken  his  mission,  or  else  has  no  real 
mission  to  fulfil,  who  is  not  ready  to  welcome  any  honest 
and  fairly  competent  attempt  at  so  important  a  task. 


CHAPTER  II 

HISTORY  OF  OPINION 

TO  write  a  detailed  history  of  the  opinions  of  reflective 
thinkers  respecting  the  nature,  origin,  limits,  and 
relations  to  reality,  of  human  knowledge,  would  be  to  traverse 
the  whole  field  of  the  more  important  philosophical  litera- 
ture. But  a  far  narrower  and  less  arduous  work  is  proposed 
for  the  sketch  made  in  the  two  following  chapters.  The 
character  of  this  sketch  is  to  be  understood  and  its  value 
estimated  only  by  keeping  steadily  in  mind  both  the  consid- 
erations which  have  chiefly  influenced  it.  First,  only  those 
authors  have  been  selected  for  brief  review  whose  opinions 
have  been  found  most  suggestive  and  helpful  in  the  histori- 
cal study  of  the  epistemological  problem.  Second,  among 
the  opinions  of  these  authors  only  such  points  of  suggestion 
and  helpfulness  have  been  noted  as,  on  the  one  hand,  seem 
most  distinctive  of  their  particular  authors,  and,  on  the 
other  hand,  fit  in  best  with  our  own  method  of  study  and 
with  the  conclusions  to  which  it  has  led  us.  Selections 
and  omissions  alike  must  be  regarded  in  the  light  of  these 
considerations. 

"Antiquity,"  says  Windelband,1  "did  not  attain  a  theory 
of  investigation."  This  statement  is  true  only  if  by  "a 
theory  of  investigation  "  we  mean  to  indicate  such  a  concep- 
tion and  treatment  of  the  grounds  of  knowledge  and  of  the 
method  of  attaining  truth  as  prevail  in  their  modern  more 

1  A  History  of  Philosophy  (English  Translation  by  Professor  Tufts),  p.  198. 


HISTORY  OF  OPINION  31 

precise  and  systematic  form.  But  in  Plato,  and  in  many 
writers  from  Plato  onward  through  antiquity,  not  a  few  nug- 
gets of  most  precious  truth  on  the  "elaboration  of  those 
cognitions  which  belong  to  the  concern  of  reason  "  are  found 
scattered.  Kant  was  by  no  means  the  first  to  criticise 
acutely  the  "  pretensions  of  reason  to  transcendent  insights  "  ; 
neither  was  he  the  first  who  undertook  to  "make  room  for 
faith"  by  "removing  knowledge."  Even  much  more  is 
true,  for  there  are  in  ancient  and  mediaeval  authors  frequent 
suggestions  of  a  correct  theory,  variously  shaped  and  pro- 
pounded, which  the  modern  student  of  the  psychology  and 
philosophy  of  cognition  cannot  wisely  afford  to  overlook. 
Nor  need  one  hesitate  to  affirm  that  in  some  cardinal  par- 
ticulars the  Church  Fathers  Origen  and  Augustine  were 
nearer  the  final  statement  of  facts,  and  showed  more  of 
verifiable  speculative  insight  into  the  significance  of  the 
facts  than  Kant  himself.  Yet  so  distinctive  was  the  con- 
ception which  the  latter  held  of  the  epistemological  prob- 
lem, so  relatively  firm  his  grasp  upon  it  in  all  its  large 
roundness,  and  so  unique  the  answer  which  he  elaborated, 
that  the  entire  history  of  human  reflection  upon  this  prob- 
lem fitly  divides  itself  at  the  Kantian  epoch. 

It  is  indispensable  for  the  recognition  and  use  of  the  sug- 
gestions which  antiquity  and  even  the  Middle  Ages  afford, 
that  the  loose  and  figurative  forms  of  expression  employed 
by  the  writers  of  these  periods  should  be  pardoned  and  set 
aside.  Modern  thinking  must  gladly  accept  the  truths  they 
suggest,  although  the  expression  given  to  these  truths  may 
be  much  too  fanciful  to  accord  well  with  modern  philo- 
sophical taste.  Furthermore,  the  practical,  the  ethical,  and 
the  religious  bearings  of  the  problem  and  of  the  solution 
which  happens  to  be  suggested  for  it  are  seldom  or  never  lost 
out  of  sight  by  these  writers.  A  purely  speculative  interest 
in  epistemology,  or  a  rigidly  technical  presentation  of  its 
various  possible  answers  must  not  be  expected  from  them. 


32  HISTORY  OF   OPINION 

But  in  this  respect,  too,  it  is  far  from  being  certain  that 
the  modern  philosophy  of  knowledge  has  not  something  valu- 
able to  learn  from  its  earlier  and  vaguer  forms. 

It  is  the  Platonic  Socrates  and  Plato  —  for  we  do  not  care 
to  distinguish  the  two  — who  first  has  something  interesting 
to  say  to  us  respecting  the  origin,  the  nature,  and  the  vali- 
dating of  knowledge.  In  Socrates'  rude  midwifery  and  in 
the  polished  dialectic  of  Plato  attempts  are  not  wanting  to 
criticise  man's  cognitive  faculty  and  its  product  of  so-called 
knowledge.  Nor  is  the  conception  of  a  theory  of  knowledge, 
a  science  of  science,  unknown  to  Plato.  There  are  hints  at 
this  conception  in  the  distinction  between  the  "  what  "  of 
knowledge  and  the  "that"  of  knowledge  (between  a  ol8ev  and 
OTL  olSev).  The  question  as  to  the  possibility  of  such  a 
science  is  raised  in  the  "Charmides";  and  again  in  the 
" Thesetetus, "  under  form  of  the  inquiry,  "What  is  knowl- 
edge ? "  And  although  the  notion  of  an  absolutely  self- 
determined  knowledge  is  disputed  by  Socrates,  it  is  concluded 
that,  if  a  science  of  science  can  be  found,  it  will  also  be 
"the  science  of  the  absence  of  science."1  The  critique  of 
cognitive  faculty,  that  is  to  say,  will  give  us  the  absolute 
criteria  of  truth  and  of  error  in  general.  This  science  of 
science  is  not  identical  with  self-knowledge ;  for  the  former 
determines  that,  "of  two  things,  one  is,  and  the  other  is 
not,  science  or  knowledge."  Neither  is  it  identical  with 
wisdom;  for  such  a  science  is  not  the  cure  of  folly,  although 
it  is  the  cure  of  the  scepticism  and  agnosticism  which  are 
the  breeders  of  folly.2 

The  problem  of  the  origin  of  knowledge  was  a  puzzling 
one  to  Plato,  as  it  has  always  been  to  all  who  have  made  it 
the  subject  of  reflection.  For  to  give  the  descriptive  history 
of  how  the  different  concrete  and  actual  cognitions  arise  in 
consciousness  did  not  seem  to  him  a  sufficient  explanation 
of  their  arising  at  all,  or  of  the  universal  forms  under  which 

i  Charmides,  166.  2  Ibid.  172. 


HISTORY  OF  OPINION  33 

they  arose.  Such  history  might  explain  what  I  know,  why 
I  know  this  rather  than  that ;  but  it  could  not  explain,  he 
thinks,  that  I  know  rather  than  have  an  opinion  or  a  thought, 
and  that  this  knowledge  is  an  implied  seizure  of  reality. 
Herein  lies  the  mystery  of  knowledge.  This  recognized 
certainty  of  present  reality  appears  to  Plato  as  implying 
some  sort  of  commerce  with  the  invisible  world  of  the  ideal. 
How  otherwise  can  that  which  is  universal,  necessary,  and 
eternal  be  given  to  every  man  in  the  concrete,  varied,  and 
fleeting  experiences  of  his  earthly  life  ?  In  the  "  Meno,"  for 
example,  the  difficulty  of  defining  virtue  leads  to  the  con- 
viction of  the  truth :  "  Nature  is  of  one  kindred ;  and  every 
soul  has  a  seed  or  germ  which  may  be  developed  into  all 
knowledge."  Even  Meno's  slaves  recognize  some  elementary 
relations  of  all  the  geometrical  figures.  But  though  the 
simple  sensations  which  reach  the  soul  through  the  body  are 
given  by  nature,  at  birth,  to  men  and  to  animals,  reflections 
on  the  being  and  use  of  the  sensations  are  gained  slowly 
and  with  difficulty,  if  they  are  ever  gained  at  all,  by  educa- 
tion and  by  experience.  But  how  can  education  and  expe- 
rience account  for  all  that  is  in  every  man's  knowledge  ? 
It  must  be  that  cognition,  somehow,  is  prior  to  particular 
cognitions.  As  to  the  manner  of  this  pre-existence  of  the 
universal  and  necessary  element  of  cognition,  Jowett,  misled 
by  Plato's  figurative  use  of  words,  commits  him  to  the 
modern  evolutionary  hypothesis  that  it  "exists,  not  in  the 
previous  state  of  the  individual,  but  of  the  race."  The 
rather  have  we  here,  though  only  dimly  apprehended,  the 
thought  that  the  origin  of  knowledge  cannot  be  understood 
merely  empirically,  but  must  be  found  in  the  native  consti- 
tution of  the  cognitive  soul.1  How  did  it  get  there?  Here 
Plato's  characteristic  figurative  ontology  must  account  for 
the  fallacy  in  his  argument.  Socrates  is  made  to  say: 
"  But  if  he  did  not  acquire  the  knowledge  in  this  life,  he 

1  Compare  Theaetetus,  186  ;  Meno,  86;  Phaedo,  73. 
3 


34  HISTORY  OF   OPINION 

must  have  had  and  learned  it  at  some  other  time."  And 
again,  Cebes,  referring  to  Socrates,  remarks :  "  Your  favorite 
doctrine  that  knowledge  is  recollection."  Thus  the  pre- 
existence  and  immortality  of  the  cognitive  soul  is  made  to 
stand  or  fall  with  the  ontological  doctrine  of  the  ideal 
world.  For  "if  the  ideas  of  men  are  eternal,  their  souls 
are  eternal;  and  if  not  the  ideas,  then  not  the  souls."1 

The  impossibility  of  giving  a  wholly  empirical  account  of 
the  origin  of  cognition,  and  the  necessity  of  recognizing 
elements  that  for  their  explanation  demand  an  appeal  to  the 
reality  and  eternal  existence  of  the  ideal,  are  tenets  in  the 
Platonic  doctrine  of  knowledge.  These  same  tenets  are 
repeatedly  affirmed  in  the  treatment  given  to  the  essential 
nature  of  knowledge;  for  truth  cannot  be  imparted  by  the 
best  of  the  senses,  not  even  by  sight  and  hearing.  The 
disparagement  of  sensuous  cognition  is  common  to  Plato 
with  most  idealists;  and  this  mistaken  view  is  connected 
with  the  failure  —  which  he  shares  in  common  with  modern 
solipsism  —  to  recognize  that  both  thought  and  the  mental 
leap  to  reality  are  involved  in  all  perception.  And  so  he 
distinguishes  knowledge  from  opinion,  which  is  interme- 
diate between  ignorance  and  knowledge,  even  asserting  that 
the  two  have  to  do  with  different  kinds  of  matter  corre- 
sponding to  different  faculties,2  and  from  belief,  which 
may  be  false,  while  there  can  be  no  false  knowledge;  and 
he  endeavors  to  refute  the  view  that  perception  of  things 
is  knowledge  at  all.3  Here  the  Hindu  mysticism,  which 
regarded  the  soul  as  addressing  itself  in  every  act  of  per- 
ception of  a  Thing  with  a  "That-too-art-thou,"  came  far 
nearer  the  truth  than  did  the  Greek  idealism.  But  with 
Plato  it  is  thought  by  which  existence  must  be  revealed  to 
the  soul,  if  at  all.4  Dialectic  is  the  true  method  of  rational 
knowledge.  Upon  this  point  Plato  comes  nearest  to  the 

1  Phsedo.  76.  2  Republic,  477. 

8  Theatetus,  152  f.  *  Phsedo,  65. 


HISTORY  OF  OPINION  35 

truth  in  the  statement  that  knowledge  is  true  opinion  accom- 
panied by  a  reason,  or  resting  on  a  ground.1  It  is  this  over- 
estimate of  dialectic  as  the  deliverer  of  knowledge  within 
the  soul  of  man,  which  is  the  chief  error  of  Plato  and  of 
all  similar  forms  of  idealism  since  Plato  until  the  present 
hour. 

On  one  other  phase  of  the  problem  of  knowledge  the 
Platonic  writings  are  worthy  to  instruct  the  student  of  the 
epistemological  problem  to  the  end  of  time.  Throughout 
does  Plato  emphasize  the  dependence  of  knowledge  on  desire, 
aspiration,  virtue,  and  character.  "In  the  'Phsedrus, '  "  says 
Jowett,  "love  and  philosophy  join  hands."  With  the  excep- 
tion of  some  of  the  writers  of  the  Christian  Church  we  have 
to  wait  until  Fichte  to  have  the  inseparable  and  vital  union 
of  cognition  with  the  life  of  feeling  and  action  so  emphati- 
cally affirmed.  "The  true  knowledge  of  things  in  heaven 
and  earth  is  based  upon  enthusiasm,  or  love  of  the  ideas 
going  before  us  and  ever  present  to  us  in  this  world  and  in 
another."  Only  through  the  exercise  of  this  love  can  that 
divine  knowledge  be  attained  which  is  "knowledge  absolute 
in  existence  absolute."  Hence  the  firm  connection  between 
knowledge  and  the  teleology  of  the  idea  of  the  good;2  for, 
indeed,  the  idea  of  the  good  is  the  cause  of  science,  and 
virtue  is  identical  with  knowledge.3  In  a  word,  it  is  the 
distinguishing  feature  of  Plato's  doctrine  of  cognition  that 
he  treats  knowledge,  not  as  "pure,"  but  as  the  epistemolog- 
ical and  metaphysical  presupposition  of  ethics. 

It  is  the  merit  of  Aristotle  to  have  brought  the  early 
attempts  at  a  science  of  knowledge  into  much  more  definite 
and  systematic  shape  —  especially  in  his  works  on  Logic  and 
Metaphysics.  On  the  possibility  of  such  a  science  we  find 
with  him  no  such  expressions  of  doubt,  approaching  despair, 
as  are  found  in  Plato;  also  no  such  merely  tentative  and 

1  Thesetetus,  206  f.  2  Compare  Republic,  508. 

3  To  show  which,  is  the  aim  of  the  "  Protagoras." 


86  HISTORY  OF  OPINION 

mystical  treatment  of  his  problem.  Aristotle  distinctly 
recognizes  the  truth  that,  since  there  are  certain  principles 
common  to  all  the  particular  sciences,  and  since,  although 
these  principles  depend  upon  one  another,  the  process  of 
regressive  dependence  cannot  go  on  forever,  therefore  there 
are  premises  which  are  themselves  undemonstrable,  but 
from  which  all  demonstration  begins.1  His  view  of  the 
criteria  of  cognition  seems  to  have  been  in  part  derived  from 
his  criticism  of  the  doctrine  of  Protagoras  (irav  TO  fyaivojjievov 
dX77#e?).  In  spite  of  Grote's  assertion  that  Aristotle  dis- 
countenances altogether  the  doctrine  which  represents  the 
mind,  or  intellect,  as  "a  source  of  first  or  universal  truths 
peculiar  to  itself,"  the  doctrine  of  the  Greek  thinker  amounts 
to  an  espousal  of  a  certain  form  of  apriorism  in  respect  of 
the  sources  and  nature  of  human  cognition.2 

Knowledge,  according  to  Aristotle,  has  its  origin  both  in 
dialectical  induction  and  logical  demonstration.  The  soul, 
in  its  thinking  nature,  possesses  the  possibility  of  all  knowl- 
edge (all  knowledge  dynamically) ;  but  it  actually  attains  to 
its  knowledge  only  by  degrees.3  His  doctrine  of  the  syllo- 
gism leads  him  to  conclude  that  there  are  two  kinds  of  ulti- 
mate presuppositions :  these  are  (1)  the  actual  fact  as  known 
to  us  in  perception  without  proof,  and  (2)  general  principles 
whose  source  is  in  reason  (vow),  —  the  power  of  direct, 
intuitive,  and  therefore  unerring  knowledge  of  such  prin- 
ciples. Here  we  have  a  hint  at  the  different  kinds  of  impli- 
cates which  have  already  been  discovered  as  given  in  the 
fact  "I  know."  And  although  in  his  psychology  Aristotle 
regards  the  mind  as  in  some  sort  a  tabula  rasa,  thought  takes 
the  main  part  in  writing  some  definite  object  upon  the 

*  See  Anal.  Post.  p.  100,  b.  3. 

2  This  we  should  argue,  not  simply  on  the  basis  of  an  appeal  to  passages  in 
which  Aristotle  appears  as  the  champion  of  "  common-sense  "  (such  as  Eth. 
Nikom.  I.,  vii.,  14,  and  Eth.  Eud.  V.,  vi.  f.),  but  chiefly  as  having  his  general  doc- 
trine of  the  nature  and  growth  of  knowledge  in  mind. 

8  Anal.  Post,  p.  71,  b.  33;  Phys.  L,  p.  184,  a.  16. 


HISTORY  OF  OPINION  37 

tablet. 1  By  "  thought "  is  meant,  not  a  merely  sensuous  per- 
ception, although  in  perception  thought  is  always  accom- 
panied by  sensuous  images  (^avrda-^ara) ;  but  the  intuition 
of  that  which  is  rational  (the  vorjrd)  is  a  necessary  part  of 
the  knowledge  even  of  things.  For  it  is  not  in  reason  (vovs) 
as  merely  passive  (Tra^^ri/co?),  but  also  as  creative  (Trot^Tt/eoY), 
that  knowledge  has  its  source.  And  there  is  an  activity  of 
the  reason  as  such  ("  pure  "),  which  consists  in  the  imme- 
diate grasping  of  the  highest  truths.  For  knowledge  becomes 
possible  only  as  reason  creates,  into  rational  form,  the  object 
of  knowledge. 

Further  as  to  Aristotle's  view  of  the  nature  of  knowledge 
we  learn  by  following  his  description  of  the  laws  and  manner 
of  its  growth.  The  mind  rises,  he  thinks,  by  successive  steps 
from  individual  observations  to  perception,  from  perception, 
by  means  of  memory,  to  experience,  and  from  such  expe- 
rience to  the  truer  knowledge.  Aristotle  defends  the  truth 
of  sense-perception.  And  it  is  in  the  interests  of  this  view 
—  as  we  should  now  say,  "  for  the  sake  of  knowledge  "  as 
such,  and  not,  like  Plato,  for  the  sake  of  ethics  —  that  he 
develops  the  theory  of  the  syllogism.  Complete  science  is 
realized  only  when  that  which  needs  to  be  proved  is  derived 
through  all  the  intermediate  members  from  its  highest  pre- 
suppositions.2 In  the  Metaphysics  he  discusses  the  principle 
of  non-contradiction  and  finds  it  the  most  cognizable  of  all 
principles  ;  and  yet,  for  this  very  reason,  quite  undemon- 
strable.3  The  true  object  of  knowledge  he  agrees  with  Plato 
in  holding  to  be  only  the  necessary  and  the  unchanging. 
Cognition  cannot  be  explained  unless  the  universal  and  the 
particular  are  "  looked  at  in  implication  of  each  other." 
But  with  him  it  is  not  the  universal  as  extra  to  the  concrete 
envisaged  reality,  but  the  universal  as  immanent  in  the  in- 

1  Compare  De  Anima,  and  for  citations  see  Zeller's  "  Outlines  of  the  History 
of  Greek  Philosophy,"  p.  207,  note. 

2  See  Anal.  Prior,  p.  24,  b.  18.  3  Met.  p.  1005,  b.  20. 


38  HISTORY  OF  OPINION 

dividual  thing  (universale  in  re,  not  universale  extra  rem"). 
So,  then,  with  Aristotle,  as  not  with  Plato,  the  important 
truth  is  emphasized  that  knowledge  is  a  development  resting 
upon  a  basis  of  sense-perception,  and  requiring  rational 
faculty  which  proceeds  according  to  laws  of  its  own.  In 
this  regard,  indeed,  the  pupil  stands  far  nearer  than  his 
teacher  to  the  modern  psychology  of  knowledge.  As  has 
been  well  said,  he  displaces  "  the  seat  of  reality  "  and  trans- 
fers it  from  the  abstract  universal  of  mere  thinking  to  the 
concrete  particular  of  sense-perception.1 

Finally,  with  Aristotle,  far  more  than  with  Plato,  knowl- 
edge has  its  end  in  itself  rather  than  in  being  a  means, 
or  requisite,  of  virtue.  Philosophy  is  itself  a  greater  good 
than  any  of  the  virtues.2  Cognition  is  thus  more  clearly  dis- 
tinguished from  moral  activity.  Connected  with  this  diver- 
gence of  theory  is  another :  for,  in  the  view  of  the  later 
thinker,  the  attainment  of  knowledge  is  much  less  dependent 
on  emotional  and  voluntary  attitudes ;  and  empirical  data  are 
made  more  important  for  establishing  our  cognitions.  Desire, 
aspiration,  love,  and  intuition,  retreat  into  the  background. 
The  doctrine  of  the  practical  syllogism  remains,  however : 
"No  creature  moves  or  acts  except  with  some  end  in  view."  3 
And  the  mission  of  philosophy  also  remains,  as  with  Plato, 
"  the  knowledge  of  unchangeable  Being  and  of  the  ultimate 
bases  of  things,  of  the  universal  and  necessary." 4 

Little  that  throws  new  light  on  the  problem  of  knowledge 
is  to  be  learned  from  the  post-Aristotelian  schools  of  phi- 
losophy. The  Stoics,  however,  elaborated  in  a  somewhat 
instructive  way  the  view  of  Aristotle  regarding  the  criteria 
of  cognition ;  while .  it  was  a  fundamental  tenet  with  this 
whole  group  of  thinkers  to  emphasize  the  importance,  for 
right  living,  of  scientific  inquiry.  Though  the  ontology  of 

1  Compare  Grote,  ii.  pp.  257  f. 

2  Sec  A.  Grant,  the  Ethics  of  Aristotle  (3d  ed.),  i.  pp.  226  f. 

8  De  Mot.  An.,  vi.  f.  *  ZeUer,  Outlines,  etc.,  p.  180. 


HISTORY  OF  OPINION  39 

the  Stoics  undoubtedly  has  a  quasi-materialistic  outcome,  the 
content  of  human  consciousness  is  so  sharply  contrasted  with 
real  being  as  to  give  a  painful  emphasis  to  the  epistemo- 
logical  problem :  "  How  are  we  to  construe  the  relations  by 
which  this  content  refers  to  real  being  and  agrees  with  it  ?" 
As  to  the  sources  of  knowledge,  Zeno  holds  that  it  must  all 
proceed  from  perception,  as  though  the  soul  were  a  tabula 
rasa  ;  but  Chrysippus  defines  knowledge  as  a  change  produced 
on  the  soul  by  an  object.  From  the  impression  (rv-jrwcr^} 
arises  the  presentation  of  mental  images  (fyavraa-ia).  Out  of 
perceptions  come  recollections,  and  from  these  experience  ; 
and  by  conclusions  from  what  is  immediately  given  in  percep- 
tions we  arrive  at  general  images  (icoival  wvoiai).  Science, 
however,  depends  on  the  regulated  formation  and  demonstra- 
tion of  concepts.  When  pressed  to  the  last  resort,  the 
possibility  of  knowledge  is  made  by  the  Stoics  to  rest  upon 
the  assertion  that  otherwise  no  action  carrying  with  it  a 
rational  conviction  is  possible.  And  so  perception  and  science 
are  both  made,  in  an  unanalyzed  and  inexplicable  mixture, 
the  sources  of  cognition. 

As  to  the  nature  of  knowledge,  Zeno's  illustration  (sensa- 
tion is  like  the  extended  fingers  ;  conception  like  the  fist ; 
and  knowledge,  or  science,  like  one  fist  clasped  by  another) 
seems  to  resolve  the  differences  in  the  different  stages  of 
cognition  into  those  of  degree  only.  But  knowledge  is  defined 
by  the  Stoics  as  "  a  fixed  and  immovable  conception,  or 
system  of  such  conceptions."  In  other  words,  cognition  is  a 
system  of  perceptions  and  of  notions  derived  by  applying 
logical  processes  to  perceptions. 

Here,  at  once  the  psychological  doctrine  of  the  nature  of 
cognition  is  merged  in  the  epistemological  doctrine  of  the 
criteria  of  cognition.  How  is  truth  to  be  attained,  and  how 
distinguished  from  the  error  with  which,  in  experience,  it 
is  so  closely  intermingled  ?  Now  part  of  our  conceptions 
are  of  such  a  nature  that  they  compel  consent ;  we  are  con- 


40  HISTORY  OF  OPINION 

scious  that  they  can  only  arise  from  something  real,  for  they 
have  direct  evidence  (frepyeta).  This  kind  of  conceiving 
involves  a  mental  "  seizure  "  (tfaTaA/^i?)  ;  and  so  it  differs 
from  the  passive  having  of  mere  notions,  even  when  the 
conscious  contents  are  the  same,  by  having  also  the  active 
consciousness  of  agreement  with  its  object.  Cognition,  in  the 
form  of  a  "  conceptual  presentation "  compelling  conviction, 
becomes  then  the  Criterion  of  Truth.1  In  all  the  Stoical 
doctrine  the  important  psychological  conclusions  are  recog- 
nized that  (1)  judgment,  produced  by  the  faculty  of  thought, 
is  necessary  to  knowledge ; 2  and  (2)  knowledge  which  allows 
of  certainty  of  conviction  requires  that  perception  and 
thought  should  be  somehow  brought  into  harmonious  rela- 
tions. A  true  perception  is  one  which  represents  the  object 
as  it  really  is ;  but  how  shall  we  know  when  we  have  such 
a  perception  ?  To  answer  this  problem  the  appeal  is  some- 
times made  to  the  strength  of  the  impression  and  of  the 
conviction  which  the  impression  carries ;  sometimes  to  that 
distinction  in  the  form  of  notions  which  laid  the  basis  of 
the  third  part  added  to  Logic  by  the  Stoics,  —  namely, 
the  Doctrine  of  the  Standard  of  Truth  or  the  Theory  of 
Knowledge ;  but,  in  the  last  resort,  as  has  already  been 
said,  to  the  practical  postulate  that  "  unless  the  cognition 
of  truth  were  possible,  it  would  be  impossible  to  act  on  fixed 
principles  and  rational  convictions."  3  Here  we  return  to  the 
point  on  the  circumference  of  the  circle  from  which  we  set 
out :  The  search  after  a  firm  support  for  the  life  of  conduct 
compels  us  to  investigate  the  criteria  of  truth ;  but  the  investi- 
gation of  the  criteria  of  truth  brings  us  to  the  conclusion  that 
these  criteria  are  chiefly  to  be  found  in  the  necessity  felt  by  the 
soul  for  a  firm  support  for  the  life  of  conduct.  Let  us  not  forget 

1  This  view  must  not  be  confounded  with  that  of  the  innate  ideas  which  was 
propagated  on  into  the  Middle  Ages  under  the  Stoic  name. 

2  Compare  Sext.  Adv.  Math.,  viii.  70  f. ;  Diog.,  vii.  63. 

8  This  is  the  position  of  Plutarch  and  Stobaeus ;    on  the  entire  subject  see 
Heinze,  "  Zur  Erkenntnisslehre  der  Stoiker,"  Leipzig,  1880. 


HISTORY  OF  OPINION  41 

this  gyratory  motion  of  the  Stoics  in  their  quest  for  a  defen- 
sible theory  of  cognition.  It  is  somewhat  of  a  return  to  Plato 
from  Aristotle,  who  regarded  knowledge  rather  more  as  an 
end  in  itself.  It  may  suggest  to  the  modern  student  of 
epistemology  the  truths  that,  in  cognition,  the  soul  is  one, 
a  unitary  being  incapable  of  divorcing  feeling  and  willing 
from  its  thinking ;  and,  also,  that  the  action  of  so-called 
necessity  and  the  action  of  reason  is  not  two  principles,  but 
only  one. 

Little  additional  to  the  lessons  taught  by  the  Stoics  is  to 
be  gained  by  a  study  of  the  ancient  Epicureans  and  Sceptics. 
The  former  held  that,  in  theory,  perception  furnishes  the 
criterion  of  truth  and  that  what  is  most  obvious  (by  its 
evepyeia')  is  always  true ;  nor  can  such  truth  be  doubted 
without  destroying  the  foundations  both  of  knowledge  and 
of  action.  But,  in  practice,  pleasure  and  pain  furnish  the 
criterion.  Yet  these  teachers  were,  of  course,  pressed  to 
the  important  admission  that  the  knowledge  requisite  simply 
for  wise  conduct  needs,  besides,  cognition  of  that  which  is 
not  immediately  perceptible;  it  needs  the  cognition  of  the 
grounds  of  phenomena  and  also  of  the  expectations  for  the 
future  which  may  be  inferred  from  these  grounds.  Thus 
both  Epicureans  and  Stoics,  as  a  sort  of  fundamental  postu- 
late upon  which  alone  the  wise  man  can  ground  his  maxims 
for  the  practical  life,  came  to  the  recognition  of  the  truth 
that  there  is  agreement  of  the  individual  reason  with  the 
universal,  with  the  World-Reason,  —  an  implied  mental  seizure 
upon  the  heart  of  Reality. 

To  something  like  the  same  opinion  even  certain  of  the 
Sceptics  were  finally  driven.  They  did,  indeed,  theoretically 
hold  that  the  essential  nature  of  things  is  inaccessible  to 
human  knowledge ;  nothing  is  immediately  certain  ;  nothing, 
therefore,  can  be  made  mediately  certain  by  processes  of  argu- 
ment. This  scepticism  they  defended  by  calling  attention  to 
the  conflict  of  opinions,  to  the  endless  regressus  in  proving,  to 


42  HISTORY   OF  OPINION 

the  relativity  of  all  perception,  to  the  impossibility  of  other 
than  hypothetical  premises,  and  to  the  circle  in  the  syllogism. 
It  is  most  interesting,  however,  to  notice  how  some  of  them 
—  Arcesilaus,  for  example  —  brought  forward  the  view  that, 
in  the  practical  life,  the  wise  man  must  content  himself  with 
a  certain  kind  of  trust  (vr^m?),  according  to  which  some 
ideas  are  the  more  probable,  reasonable,  and  adaptable  to  the 
purposes  of  life. 

This  impressive  exhibition  which  Greek  antiquity  furnishes 
of  the  relations,  both  in  fact  and  in  theory,  between  our 
doctrine  of  cognition  and  our  life  of  conduct,  as  well  as  its 
accompanying  recognition  of  "  confidence,"  "  conviction," 
"  trust,"  as  an  inseparable  element  of  cognition  itself,  fitly 
prepare  the  way  for  a  consideration  of  the  views  of  two  great 
thinkers  among  the  Fathers  of  the  Christian  Church.  In 
respect  of  their  insight  into  the  true  state  of  the  case,  and 
as  estimated  by  the  important  points  which  they  make  through 
their  discursive  treatment  of  the  subject,  Origen  and  Augus- 
tine are  entirely  worthy  to  stand  beside  Plato  and  Aristotle. 
To  understand  their  points  of  view  we  must  remember  that 
the  very  nature  of  the  regnant  philosophy,  and  the  urgent 
needs  of  the  age,  turned  the  currents  of  thought  from  purely 
speculative  into  practical  and  religious  channels.  The  great 
doctrine  of  a  "  Christian  Gnosis  "  was  now  the  form  in  which 
a  theory  of  knowledge  was  found  interesting  and  was  actually 
discussed.  Two  important  truths  derived  from  non-Chris- 
tian Gnosticism  became,  from  this  time  onward,  very  in- 
fluential. These  were  the  exceedingly  influential  conception 
of  self-consciousness  (7rapaKo\ovdelv  eaurw),  —  of  intellect  as 
thought  active  and  in  motion  (i>o'/7<n?),  having  for  its  object 
itself,  as  a  resting,  objective  thought  (vor^rov) ;  and  thus 
the  identification  of  intellect  as  knowledge  with  intellect 
as  being.1 

1  See  Wiudelband,  A  History  of  Philosophy,  p.  234 ;  and  Plotinus,  Eun.  L 
4,10. 


HISTORY  OF  OPINION  43 

In  Origen's  thought,  as  in  the  thought  of  Clement  and 
of  the  Alexandrine  School  generally,  Christianity  —  its  tenets 
being  rationally  understood  and  explained  —  is  Knowledge. 
But  to  attain  this  knowledge,  we  must  advance  to  it,  from 
faith  through  philosophy ;  and,  indeed,  he  who  would  attain 
the  true  Gnosis  without  philosophy  is  to  be  compared  to  the 
man  who  would  gather  grapes  without  cultivating  his  vines.1 
The  sources  of  such  true  and  highest  knowledge  are  both 
subjective  and  objective.  Among  the  former  are  faith,  hope, 
imagination,  love ;  these  are  the  avenues  through  which 
cognition  comes  to  the  human  soul.  Love  and  mental  grasp 
go  hand  in  hand.  Here,  then,  we  meet  again  with  the  beauti- 
ful and  stirring  conception  of  Plato,  that  the  craving  for 
truth  is  divinely  planted,  as  an  honorable  passion  which 
may  not  honorably  be  denied.  Gaining  knowledge  implies 
a  progressive  assimilation  of  the  soul  to  God.  The  objective 
sources  of  knowledge,  in  the  view  of  this  Church  Father,  are 
Scripture  and  the  Church,  which  are  assumed  to  be  in  har- 
mony. But  the  source  of  all  true  knowledge  is  undivided ; 
it  is  one,  and  only  one  ;  it  is  divine  revelation.  God  him- 
self, "  an  incomparable  intellectual  nature "  ("  in  all  parts 
Movds  and,  so  to  speak,  'Eva?  ")  is  the  Mind,  and  the  Source, 
from  which  all  intellectual  nature  or  mind  takes  its  begin- 
ning.2 Origen's  fundamental  postulate,  then,  is  this  :  The 
mind  of  the  illumined  and  cultured  man  is  akin  to  God, 
and  has  thus  become  capable  of  knowing  the  truth  of  God, 
the  Absolute  Mind.  For  how  could  rational  beings  exist 
unless  the  Word  or  Reason  had  previously  existed  ?  How 
could  men  be  wise,  unless  there  were  wisdom  in  the  world 
of  the  really  Existent  ?  Rational  beings  derive  their  rational 
nature  from  God  through  the  Logos.  "  Now  we  are,"  he 
affirms,3  "  of  opinion  that  every  rational  creature,  without 
any  distinction,  receives  a  share  of  Him,"  —  that  is,  of  the 

1  Compare  Strom.  II.  vii.  and  ix. 

2  De  Princ.,  I.  i.  6.  8  De  Princ.  II.  vii.  2. 


44  HISTORY  OF  OPINION 

Holy  Spirit,  the  revealer  of  Absolute  Reason  to  the  reason 
of  man. 

Origen's  view  of  the  nature  of  knowledge  follows  from  .the 
foregoing  description  of  the  sources  of  knowledge.  This 
thinker  felt  that,  while  much  of  the  non-Christian  philoso- 
phizing moved  in  the  region  of  mere  abstraction,  the  Christian 
Gnosis  gave  a  living  grasp  upon  realities,  both  persons  and 
facts,  which  it  was  his  aim  to  present  in  the  form  of  a 
rational  system  as  objective  truth.  Not  by  sense-perception 
alone  can  knowledge  come.  For  "  it  is  one  thing  to  see, 
and  another  to  know  :  to  see  and  to  be  seen  is  a  property 
of  material  bodies  ;  to  know,  and  to  be  known,  an  attribute 
of  intellectual  being."  J  Knowledge  is  of  the  mind,  intel- 
lectual. But  the  proposal  to  change  faith  into  knowledge 
does  not  imply  questioning,  much  less  rejecting  the  entire 
content  of  faith ;  it  implies  rather  the  attempt  to  give  to 
the  accepted  content  of  faith  a  scientific  form,  such  as  shall 
commend  it  to  philosophical  or  reflective  minds.  Neverthe- 
less, it  has  truly  been  said :  "  In  all  such  doctrines  the  inter- 
est of  science  ultimately  predominates  over  that  of  faith  ; 
they  are  accommodations  of  philosophy  to  the  need  of  reli- 
gious authority,  felt  at  this  time." 

The  distinctive  thing  about  Origen's  answer  to  the  inquiry 
into  the  sources  and  the  nature  of  human  cognition  is  that 
he  makes  it  a  commerce  of  minds.  The  secret  of  this  episte- 
mological  theory  is  given  in  the  consideration  that  knowledge 
is  a  transaction  between  rational  beings.  As  to  the  source 
of  knowledge,  it  is  found  in  Absolute  Personal  Reason  reveal- 
ing its  true  life  within  the  human  personal  reason.  As  to 
the  nature  of  knowledge,  it  is  a  certain  complex  attitude  of 
human  personal  reason  toward  Absolute  Personal  Reason. 
In  this  complex  attitude,  the  more  practical  and  distinctively 
ethical  "  momenta "  of  admiring  and  aspiring  love,  of  faith 
as  a  sort  of  opening  of  the  soul  to  the  truth,  which  is  both 

l  De  Princ.  I.  i.  8. 


HISTORY  OF  OPINION  45 


a  reasonable  acquiescence  (\oyiicr)  a-vyicddeo-i*;)  and  a  volun-^ 
tary  grasp  on  the  truth  (irpokytyis  e/couo-to?),  are  made  promi- 
nent by  this  Church  Father.  However,  since  free-will  —  the 
capacity  for  virtue  and  its  opposite,  the  power  to  become 
wise  or  to  refuse  to  become  wise  —  is  the  centre  of  per- 
sonality, it  must  co-operate  with  feeling  and  intellect,  in 
order  to  attain  the  true  Gnosis.  For  how  can  knowledge 
be  divorced  from  free-will,  since  every  judgment,  which 
both  accepts  and  declares  the  truth,  is  an  act  of  free-will  ? 

Origen  is  neither  so  happy  nor  so  suggestive  in  his  answer 
to  the  question,  How  shall  the  false  and  the  true  be  distin- 
guished ?  for,  whether  we  emphasize  faith,  judgment,  con- 
viction, opinion  as  to  the  content  of  revelation,  or  the 
decision  of  free-will,  each  one  and  all  of  these  may  be 
evoked  in  the  interests  of  the  false  as  well  as  of  the  true. 
This  fact  raises  the  problem  of  the  criteria  of  knowledge. 
Origen  takes  it  for  granted  that  the  contents  of  Christian 
faith,  as  given  in  Holy  Scripture  and  declared  by  the  voice 
of  the  Church,  are  true.  The  acceptance  of  what  is  authenti- 
cally taught  is  thus  made,  by  his  epistemological  theory, 
the  ultimate  test  of  truth.  Authority  becomes  the  objective 
criterion  of  knowledge  ;  faith  is  the  right  attitude  of  soul 
for  the  attainment  of  this  knowledge.  We  must  not,  how- 
ever, discredit  this  thinker  —  the  most  suggestive  of  all 
thinkers  within  the  ancient  Church  —  by  understanding  his 
principle  of  authority  in  the  medieval  or  —  worse  still !  — 
in  the  post-Reformation  sense.  It  is  not  the  ipse-dixit, 
either  of  the  Biblical  writers  or  of  the  traditors  of  churchly 
tenets,  which  Origen  would  elevate  into  the  place  of  the  ulti- 
mate test  of  truth.  His  epistemological  postulate,  as  bearing 
upon  the  criteria  of  knowledge,  is  the  assumption  of  an  essen- 
tial identity,  in  the  ground  of  self -revealing  Reason  from  which 
both  spring,  between  authority  and  rational  knowledge. 

The  significance  of  Origen  is  so  great  for  an  historical  study 
of  the  opinions  of  reflective  thinkers  upon  the  epistemological 


46  HISTORY  OF  OPINION 

problem  that  we  gather  up  his  more  impressive  views  into 
the  following  statements  :  — 

AH  knowledge  is,  by  nature,  a  revelation  from  Absolute 
Reason,  "  a  spiritual  enlightenment "  from  the  one  Holy 
Spirit  of  God.  Hence  the  ontological  postulate  of  Origen's 
theory  of  knowledge  is  the  reality  of  the  idea  of  the  Good,  — 
a  truly  Platonic  postulate.  Our  knowledge  is  the  human 
equivalent  of  the  Divine  Idea.  Thus  insight  is  more  empha- 
sized than  ratiocination  ;  and  the  gaining  of  knowledge  be- 
comes, for  the  soul  of  man,  an  epoch,  an  illumination,  a 
surprise. 

Faith  and  reason  co-operate,  in  the  unity  of  the  soul-life, 
in  order  to  make  possible  the  reception  and  the  attainment 
of  knowledge. 

Free-will,  issuing  in  judgment  of  the  truth,  is  essential  to 
all  knowledge ;  it  is,  indeed,  the  very  self-activity  which 
becomes  knowledge  when  it  is  directed  rightly  toward  the 
absolute  and  self-revealing  Reason.  Diversity  of  will  is  the 
cause  of  the  variety  in  human  opinions  and  in  the  courses  of 
conduct  pursued  by  different  men.  Perversity  of  will  is  the 
cause,  not  only  of  all  evil  conduct,  but  also  of  all  error  in 
judgment.  It  is  the  function  of  the  moral  will,  rooted  and 
grounded  in  love,  to  lead  on  the  acquirement  of  all  knowledge 
and  all  wisdom  to  the  final  goal,  which  is  the  vision  of  all  in 
God.1  But  this  will  must  be  motived,  backed  up,  and  spurred 
forward  by  rational  love  (\oyiKr)  o/oe^i?). 

It  was  Augustine,  however,  who  first  grappled  with  the 
problem  of  cognition  in  a  thoroughly  psychological  and  criti- 
cal way.  Indeed,  Augustine  may  be  said  to  have  been  the 
first  to  place  philosophy  upon  a  psychological  basis.  It  must 
be  remembered,  however,  that  we  have  two  men  expressing 
themselves  in  the  later  writings  of  this  Church  Father  ;  and 
that  these  two  minds  move  in  opposite  directions,  and  even 
come  to  contradictory  conclusions.  It  is  not  Augustine  the 

1  Compare  De  Princ.  I.  v.  3 ;  I.  vi.  3 ;  II.  i.  2 ;  II.  iv.  3. 


HISTORY  OF  OPINION  47 

ecclesiastic,  alarmed  for  the  foundations  of  Christian  faith 
and  making  an  exoteric  appeal  to  the  authority  of  the  Church 
as  the  criterion  of  knowledge,  in  behalf  of  the  uninitiated 
and  unenlightened,  to  whom  we  may  hopefully  look  for  epis- 
temological  truth;  it  is  rather  to  Augustine  the  master  of 
psychological  analysis,  and,  in  some  sort,  the  founder  of 
philosophy  upon  the  indisputable  data  of  consciousness  for 
all  places  and  all  times.  In  Augustine's  case  the  theologian 
and  the  philosopher  are  not,  as  in  the  case  of  Origen,  of 
one  and  the  same  mind,  equally  sincere.  The  theologian, 
indeed,  is  ready  at  times  to  run  perilously  near  the  final 
sacrifice  of  all  consistency,  if  not  of  all  claim  to  sincerity. 
But  the  psychologist  and  philosopher  expounds  the  principle 
of  the  immediate  and  absolute  certainty  of  self-conscious- 
ness in  a  way  to  anticipate  Descartes  and  even  to  excel 
him.  In  his  treatment  of  this  epistemological  doctrine  Aug- 
ustine is  a  modern  man ;  or,  rather,  he  is  a  thinker  for  all 
times  to  venerate. 

It  is  with  respect  to  the  criteria  of  knowledge,  the  function 
of  philosophical  doubt,  and  the  ultimate  grounds  of  certainty, 
that  Augustine  rises  superior  to  Aristotle  and  to  all  antiquity. 
Here  we  are  charmed  by  his  skill  in  psychological  analysis 
and  by  the  thoroughness  of  his  reflective  thinking.  In  these 
subjects  he  so  far  anticipates  and  even  surpasses  the  so-called 
"  father  of  modern  philosophy  "  as  to  warrant  what  Fenelon 
said  of  him,  that  he  would  sooner  trust  Augustine  than  Des- 
cartes upon  matters  of  pure  philosophy  ;  indeed,  the  Arch- 
bishop of  Cambrai  even  declared  that  a  collection  of  this 
Church  Father's  utterances  would  be  "  much  superior  to  the 
Meditations  "  of  the  French  philosopher.  And  Nourisson l 
affirms :  "  It  is  beyond  all  question  that  this  great  man  made 
use  of  the  method,  and  put  in  practice  the  principles,  which 
Descartes  would  one  day  employ  in  order  to  reconstruct 
philosophy." 

1  Progres  de  la  Pensee  Humaine,  p.  209. 


48  HISTORY  OF  OPINION 

Augustine  sought  the  way  to  certainty  of  truth  through 
scepticism  and  criticism.  He  pointed  out  that  all  the  various 
kinds  of  conscious  states  —  memory,  judgment,  knowledge, 
and  will  —  are  involved  in  the  very  act  of  doubting.  He 
sought  also  to  demonstrate  the  existence  of  necessary  ele- 
ments in  all  cognition  in  opposition  to  the  Academicians, 
with  whom  he  at  one  time  agreed  as  to  the  practical  end  of 
happiness.1  In  the  most  primary  and  incontestable  fashion, 
he  thinks,  does  the  certainty  of  self-consciousness  affirm  the 
reality  of  the  conscious  subject.2  In  order  even  to  err,  /, 
that  err,  must  exist.  Even  the  possibility  of  our  being  de- 
ceived implies  the  fact  of  our  existence,  and  makes  being, 
life,  and  thought  co-ordinate.  Every  one  who  knows  himself 
as  a  doubter  knows  the  truth,  and  from  this  fact  is  certain 
that  he  knows.  Let,  then,  the  man  who  wishes  to  have 
knowledge  attain  the  science  of  Self.  But  faith  is  necessary 
to  knowledge  of  the  existence  of  other  men  ;  and  we  can  only 
believe  (not  know)  that  material  bodies  exist,  though  the 
belief  is  practically  necessary.  With  profound  epistemologi- 
cal  reflection  Augustine  finds  the  idea  of  God,  as  absolute 
Truth,  involved  in  the  certainty  of  self-consciousness.  For 
how  could  we  so  much  as  question  and  doubt  our  sense- 
perceptions,  if  we  had  not  derived  criteria  and  standards  of 
truth  from  other  sources  ?  The  very  life  of  the  human  soul 
is  such  as  to  show  that  there  is  an  unchanging  norm  of 
truth,  —  God,  who  includes  all  real  being.  Thus  does  this 
great  thinker  strive  to  place  on  a  psychological  basis  the 
epistemological  conclusion  that  the  existence  of  truth  cannot 
be  doubted,  and  that  all  Reality  is  implicate  in  the  being, 
knowing,  and  willing  of  the  self-conscious  subject? 

1  See  the  De  Vita  heat ,  and  compare  Cont.  Acad.  III.  xi.  26,  where  he  finds 
the  test  of  truth  in  disjunctive  propositions,  and  remarks  that  perceptions  are,  at 
least,  subjectively  true. 

2  De  Vita  beat.,  ii.  7  ;  Solil.  II.  i.  1  f. ;  De  Ver.  Rel.  xxxix.  72  f. ;  De  Trin.  x.  14. 
8  Confessions,  VI.  v.  7 ;  De  Fide  Rerum,  i.  2 ;  De  Ver.  Rel.  xxxix.  72  f. ;  De 

Lib.  Arb.  II.  ii.  6;  De  Civ.  Dei,  i.  6. 


HISTORY  OF  OPIXION  49 

Augustine's  view  of  the  sources  and  nature  of  human  cog- 
nition is,  of  course,  dependent  upon  his  positions  regarding 
the  criteria  of  all  cognitive  faculty.     Besides  sensation  (sen- 
sus),  he  holds  that  man  possesses  the  higher   capacity   of 
reason  (intellectus  and  ratio)  ;  we  thus  have  immediate  per- 
ception of  incorporeal  truths,  —  the  principles  of  all  judging. 
Thus,  too,  all  individual  consciousness. —  and  no  less  in  its 
doubting  than  in  every  other  form  of  its  actual  functioning  — 
transcends  itself  as  individual;   it  sees  itself  attached  in  its 
own  exercise  to  something  universal  and  universally  valid.1 
It  was,  indeed,  the  influence  of  theological  prejudice  against 
the  doctrine  of  the  pre-existence  of  souls  which  led  Augustine 
to  abandon  the  Platonic  reminiscence  (avd/jLvrjcris),  and  in  more 
nearly  the  modern  way  regard  reason  as  the  intuitive  faculty  for 
the  incorporeal  world.     Yet  he  conceives  of  the  existence  of  the 
ideas  in  neo-Platonic  fashion.     They  are  principales  formce  vel 
rationes  rerum  stabiles  atque  incommutabiles,  quce  in  divino  intel- 
lectu  continentur.     All  rational  knowledge  is,  then,  ultimately, 
knowledge  of  God ;  all  ideas  are  in  God ;  He  is  the  eternal 
Ground  of  all  form,  —  the  Absolute  Unity,  the  Supreme  Beauty. 
The  knowledge  which  Augustine  seeks  is,  then,  summed  up  as 
knowledge  of  Self  and  of  God.2    The  sciences,  which  in  early 
life  he  regarded  as  avenues  to  knowledge  of  God  and  to  sal- 
vation, he  later  regarded  as  of  little  worth.     Nor  can  there 
be  any  doubt  that  this  disregard  of  scientific  knowledge,  born 
of  theological  prejudice,  had,  through  the  influence  of  Augus- 
tine, a  decisive  and  baleful  effect  upon  the  subsequent  history 
of  Christendom.     It  is  one  of  the  most  interesting  specu- 
lations  as  to  what   might  have  been   in  the   case   of  that 
"  long-standing  conflict "  between  science  and  religion,  if  the 
Descartes  of  Christian  antiquity  had  not  been  overlain  and 
submerged  by  the  ecclesiastic  anxious  to  defend  the  supreme 
and  unquestioned  authority  of  the  Church. 

1  De  Trin.  XII.  ii.  2  ;  Cont.  Acad.  HI.  xiii.  29 ;  De  Lib.  Arb.  II.  iii.  7. 

2  Deum  et  animam  scire  cupio.     Nihilne  plus  ?     Nihil  omnino.     (Solil.  I.  7.) 

4 


50  HISTORY  OF  OPINION 

With  Augustine,  even  more  than  with  Origen,  the  doctrine 
of  free-will  is  dominant  in  connection  with  his  entire  view  of 
the  criteria,  sources,  nature,  and  limits  of  cognition.  The 
primacy  of  the  will  is  maintained  in  the  entire  process  of 
thinking,  ideating,  and  knowing.  Only  in  relation  to  the 
highest  truths,  the  rational  cognitions,  is  the  attitude  of  the 
mind  more  passive  and  receptive.  Here  revelation,  as  a 
divine  illumination,  has  its  truest  sphere.  Hence  the  doc- 
trine of  TRUTH  BY  FAITH  —  a  doctrine  which  Kant  revived 
as  the  positive  outcome  of  his  critical  protest  against  an 
unwarranted  extension  of  the  pretence  of  knowledge.  How- 
ever, with  Augustine,  full  rational  insight  remains  first  in 
dignity.  But  such  insight  is  not  for  the  weak  nor  for  the 
average  man;  not  for  the  wise  even,  except  imperfectly. 
Here  again  we  are  made  witnesses  to  the  disturbing  influence 
of  the  ecclesiastic's  fears  lest  the  authority  of  the  Church 
might  suffer  if  knowledge  of  the  transcendent  should  be  too 
broadly  affirmed  as  lying  within  the  possible  domain  of  the 
"  plain  man's  "  self-conscious  life. 

On  the  whole,  however,  what  student  of  the  history  of 
epistemological  doctrine  can  deny  the  eminent  distinction 
which  Nourisson  claims  for  Augustine  as  a  reflective  and 
critical  thinker  upon  the  problem  of  knowledge  ?  To  him 
more  than  to  any  one  else  in  antiquity  (indeed,  he  has  few 
rivals  in  modern  times)  we  may  ascribe  the  three  following 
important  merits :  (1)  The  philosophic  use  of  methodical 
doubt;  (2)  the  doctrine  of  self-consciousness  as  a  manifes- 
tation, absolutely  certain,  of  the  really  existent ;  and  (3)  the 
recognition  of  the  evidence  for  making  this  particular  /cer- 
tainty the  criterion  of  all  ulterior  certainty. 

During  the  Middle  Ages  the  entire  problem  of  Being  and 
Knowing  became  absorbed  in  discussion  over  the  nature 
and  reality  of  so-called  "  universals."  The  significance  of 
this  discussion  for  all  mediseval  philosophy,  on  account  of 
its  bearing  upon  the  metaphysics  of  Christian  doctrine,  is 


HISTORY  OF  OPINION  51 

at  once  apparent.  The  general  epistemological  assumption 
of  the  regnant  school  was  that  the  more  universal  substances 
are,  the  more  real  they  are.  Reality  is  thus  regarded  as  a 
matter  of  degrees,  or  as  measurable  by  a  scale  in  which 
things  and  souls  can  have  more  or  less  of  participation.  This 
is  the  very  opposite  of  the  affirmation  of  Lotze,  that  the  mean- 
est thing  which  exists  is  as  truly  real  as  is  the  most  important 
and  imposing  universal.  In  the  mediaeval  thinking  the  iden- 
tity of-  Real  Being  with  the  thinnest  or  highest  abstractions 
was  thus  maintained  ;  real  dependence  of  things  and  events 
was  also  identified  with  logical  dependence.  A  pyramid  of 
concepts  was  erected,  and  to  this  conceptual  structure  was 
given  an  ontological  significance,  without  further  attempt  at 
criticism  or  proof.  From  this  doctrine  a  transition  was  inevi- 
table to  the  view  which  saw  the  universal  in  every  concrete 
existence  (universalia  in  re).  But  this  doctrine,  too,  was 
taken  abstractly.  One  and  the  same  reality  was  held  to  be, 
in  its  differing  status,  animate  being,  man,  Greek,  Socrates. 
Formal  and  logical  pantheism  —  essentially  like  that  of  the 
great  Jewish  thinker,  Spinoza  —  was  the  inevitable  outcome. 
The  final  ontological  assertion,  built  upon  the  fundamental 
epistemological  assumption,  becomes  the  following:  God  — 
Being  superlatively  real  (ens  realissimum). 

Some  wrong  would  be  done  to  these  mediaeval  thinkers, 
however,  if  it  were  held  that  they  contributed  nothing  what- 
ever to  the  statement  or  solution  of  the  problem  of  knowl- 
edge. In  the  field  of  psychology  they  attained  (by  speculation, 
of  course,  rather  than  by  experiment  and  induction)  a 
few  valuable  results.  The  Platonists  and  the  Mystics,  who 
undertook  to  exhibit  the  development  of  inner  life  as  the 
history  of  salvation  for  the  individual  soul,  were  promi- 
nent workers  in  this  field.  Especially  important  is  their 
thought  that,  by  virtue  of  the  motive  forces  of  will,  faith 
furnishes  conditions  to  knowledge.  Tims  Bernard  is  never 
weary  of  denouncing  the  heathenish  nature  of  the  pure 


52  HISTORY  OF   OPINION 

impulse  after  knowledge  for  its  own  sake.  With  the  great 
Thomas  the  psychology  of  knowledge  holds  an  important 
place. 1  The  human  soul  is  a  substance,  incorporeal,  imper- 
ishable, and  capable  of  apprehending  universals.  Yet  he 
maintains  the  unity  of  the  soul,2  and  informs  us  that  such 
terms  as  "the  vegetative  soul,"  "sensitive  soul,"  "rational 
soul,"  etc.,  are  not  to  be  understood  as  other  than  designat- 
ing functions  of  one  and  the  same  soul.  By  virtue  of  the 
same  soul,  Socrates  is  both  man  and  animal.  The  essential 
form,  both  generic  and  specific,  comes  from  the  soul,  which 
is  the  source  of  all  life.  With  Hugo,  cogitation,  meditation, 
contemplation,  are  the  three  stages  of  mental  activity  which 
result  in  knowledge.  Man  has  the  eye  of  flesh  to  know  the 
corporeal  world,  the  eye  of  reason  to  know  his  own  inner 
nature,  and  the  eye  of  contemplation  to  know  the  spiritual 
world  and  God.  But  Duns  Scotus  rejects  the  hypothesis  of 
soul  as  pure  form  and  energy,  possible  apart  from  the  body ; 
and  between  the  body  and  the  intelligent  soul  he  introduces 
an  inherent  forma  corporeltatis. 

In  accordance  with  his  doctrine  of  the  nature  of  the  soul, 
Thomas  Aquinas  places  it  on  a  sort  of  middle  ground  within 
the  hierarchy  of  substances.  As  to  the  source  of  knowledge, 
it  follows  that  the  soul  of  man  does  not  possess  truth  per 
se;  it  must  acquire  truth.  This  it  does  by  experiencing 
certain  elementary  notions  through  the  senses  as  its  instru- 
ment. The  whole  problem  of  the  origin  and  nature  of 
knowledge  must,  of  course,  be  attacked  by  the  Schoolmen 
in  some  form  to  make  intelligible  the  process  by  which 
universal  ideas  arise  in  the  individual  consciousness.  Nomi- 
nalism, in  the  person  of  Abelard  and  John  of  Salisbury, 
attempted  to  show  the  psychological  origin  of  knowledge. 
Sensation,  as  confused  idea,  gives  content  to  imagination, 

1  See  his  Summa  Theol.,  qusest.  75-90  and  92,  Part  I. 

2  See  the  section,  De  Anima,  in  the  Quaestiones;  especially,  §§  4-7,  11-13, 
and  20. 


HISTORY  OF   OPINION  53 

which  grasps  and  holds  together  the  content;  then  under- 
standing, by  discursive  activity,  elaborates  it  into  judgments 
and  concepts;  and  after  all  these  conditions  are  fulfilled, 
somehow  or  other,  opinion,  faith,  and  knowledge  arise,  in 
which  the  intellect  ultimately  knows  its  object  as  a  single 
collective  perception  or  intuition.  These  writers  hold  to 
the  modern  theory  that  in  sensation,  perception,  and  imagi- 
nation, an  act  of  judgment  is  performed. 

Thomas  Aquinas  and  the  Realists  generally,  however, 
held  that  all  true  knowledge  —  all  science  —  is  of  the  intel- 
lect; the  psychological  inquiry  as  to  the  nature,  results, 
and  certainty  of  its  functioning  is  thus  made  the  most 
important  of  all  epistemological  inquiries.  The  puzzling 
problem  becomes,  then,  to  reconcile  the  individuality  of 
intelligence  with  the  universality  of  the  ideas.1  The  answer 
of  Thomas  to  this  problem  is  an  evasion  of  it :  the  power  of 
apprehending  the  universal  is  assigned  by  him  to  an  "  intel- 
lective soul."  This  results  in  a  division  of  the  faculties  of 
the  soul,  which  is  wholly  inconsistent  with  his  maintenance 
elsewhere  of  the  true  view  that  the  soul  is  one,  but  gifted 
with  diverse  energies.  For  while  some  of  the  faculties,  as 
senses  and  imagination,  are  in  both  body  and  soul,  others, 
he  thinks,  like  will  and  intellect,  participate  in  no  respect 
in  the  body.2 

With  such  views  of  the  origin  of  knowledge  as  the  fore- 
going, the  validating  of  knowledge  becomes  a  hopeless 
puzzle.  And,  indeed,  the  epistemological  and  the  ontologi- 
cal  problems  are  scarcely  conceived  of  apart.  Thomas 
Aquinas  approaches  the  former  of  the  two  problems  from 

1  See  Met.  i.,  prooem.,  cap.  1 ;  Phys.  i.,  cap.  1 ;  and  comp.  Huureau,  Philosophie 
Scholastique,  ii.,  pp.  110  and  116. 

2  Windelband  (ibid.  p.  325)  holds  that  Thomas  Aquinas  and  Duns  Scotus  alike 
followed  the  old  Greek  idea  that,  in  the  process  of  cognition,  by  means  of  the  co- 
operation of  soul  and  external  object,  a  copy  of  the  latter  arises,  to  be  appre- 
hended by  the  soul.    This  doctrine  Occam  rejected  and  held  a  view  more  akin  to 
that  of  Locke  and  his  followers.     With  him  an  idea  is  indeed,  as  such,  a  state 
or  act  of  the  soul,  but  it  forms  in  the  soul  a  sign  for  the  external  thing. 


54  HISTORY  OF  OPINION 

the  point  of  view  taken  by  Aristotle  in  his  doctrine  of  form 
and  matter.  The  doctrine  of  universals  as  entities,  and  the 
attempt  to  explain  and  to  validate  knowledge,  realistically, 
by  the  assumption  of  these  entities,  are  abandoned  by  him. 
Such  ideas  he  regards  as  mere  fictions,  wrongly  posited 
in  the  interests  of  an  attempt  to  explain  the  knowledge  of 
things.  But  God  knows  all  things  in  themselves,  and  has 
no  need  of  the  intervention  of  ideas.  In  Occam's  writings 
the  fundamental  separation  between  the  world  of  sense  and 
the  supersensible  world  bears  fruit  in  the  beginnings  of  a 
psychological  and  episteniological  Idealism.  The  world  of 
consciousness  becomes  another  world  from  the  world  of 
things;  and  sensuous  knowledge  loses  for  him  its  character 
of  being  a  copy  as  compared  with  its  real  object.  Between 
the  psychological,  the  inner,  reality  and  the  ontological,  or 
outer,  reality  there  is  a  relation,  but  it  is  not  that  of 
resemblance. 

Perhaps  the  most  important  and  distinguishing  feature  of 
the  doctrine  of  the  Middle  Ages  is  its  extension  of  that 
schism  between  faith  and  knowledge  which  appeared  in  the 
later  writings  of  Augustine.  Albertus  holds  that  philosophy 
(as  of  knowledge)  and  theology  (as  of  faith)  can  no  longer 
be  identified.  All  that  is  really  known  in  philosophy  by 
the  light  of  nature  holds  good  also  in  theology;  but  the 
soul  of  man  can  completely  know  only  that  the  principles 
of  which  it  carries  within  itself.  Thomas  seems  to  reverse 
the  relation  between  faith  and  knowledge  which  Origen  and 
Augustine  (in  his  earlier  writings)  maintained.  The  rela- 
tion then  becomes  one  of  different  degrees  of  development; 
but  philosophical  knowledge  is  given  in  man's  natural 
endowment,  which  is  brought  to  full  realization  only  by  the 
grace  active  in  revelation.  Duns  Scotus  goes  further  and 
maintains  that  theology  is  a  practical  discipline,  while  phi- 
losophy is  pure  theory.  Philosophy  is  thus  made  a  secular 
science  set  over  against  theology  as  a  divine  science.  Here 


HISTORY  OF   OPINION  55 

the  relation  becomes  one  of  separation;  and  a  contradic- 
tion is  ready  to  emerge  between  knowledge  and  faith.  This 
separation  became,  as  the  rights  of  reason  were  more  vigor- 
ously maintained,  a  charter  of  liberty  for  philosophy,  but  a 
condemnation  of  theology  to  the  prison-house  of  external 
authority.  More  especially  as  to  faith  and  knowledge, 
Scotus  maintains  that  belief  in  the  Bible  and  in  the  infal- 
libility of  the  Apostles  rests  upon  the  authority  of  the 
Church. 

At  one  point,  however,  does  this  thinker  keep  alive  the 
warm  and  vital  thought  of  Plato,  of  Origen,  and  of  Augustine. 
As  an  opponent  of  determinism,  Scotus  emphasizes  the  self- 
activity  of  will  —  as  everywhere  else,  so  also  in  knowing. 
He  maintains,  in  opposition  to  Thomas,  that  thinking  often 
depends  on  willing.  The  beginning  of  all  knowledge  can  be 
called  an  act  of  receiving,  inasmuch  as  every  perception  has 
sensation  for  its  basis  et  seminarium,  which  is  possible  only 
as  the  result  of  an  impression  or  image  of  the  object. 
Even  this,  however,  is  not  mere  passivity.  In  all  percep- 
tion, the  external  object  and  the  perceiving  subject  co- 
operate.1 The  calling  up  of  the  phantasmata  and  their 
transformation  in  memory  also  implies  activity  of  will ; 
still  more  does  the  active  intellect,  the  power  of  the  soul, 
which  is  related  to  the  sensible  images  as  light  to  colors. 
But  especially  where  the  thing  is  not  certain,  and  the  con- 
sent of  will  is  compelled,  belief  (fides),  as  an  act  of  will,  is 
necessary.2  Hence  it  follows  that  a  great  deal  of  our  knowl- 
edge is  based  upon  faith ;  indeed,  the  greater  part  of  knowl- 
edge is  but  a  completion  of  belief.3 

These  few  thoughts  concerning  the  philosophy  of  knowl- 
edge are  discovered,  only  after  winnowing  them  out  of  much 
chaff,  in  the  thinking  of  the  Middle  Ages.  The  number  of 

1  Op.  Oxon.  I.  D.  3  qnsest.  4,  7,  8. 

2  De  Anima,  qusest.  17  ;  and  Report.  Par.  IV.  D.  45,  9. 
8  Report.  Par.,  Prol.,  quaest.  2. 


56  HISTORY  OF  OPINION 

thoughts  which  has  any  essential  value  would  scarcely  be  at 
all  increased  even  if  this  very  brief  sketch  were  indefinitely 
extended.  But  they  show  how  the  continuity  of  human 
reflection  upon  the  epistemological  problem  was  maintained, 
and  what  are  the  matters  in  respect  of  its  statement  and 
solution  which  it  was  considered  necessary  to  keep  before 
the  mind  for  its  critical  consideration. 


CHAPTER  III 

HISTORY  OF  OPINION  (continued) 

IT  is  a  statement  common  among  historians  of  philosophy 
that  the  foundations  of  the  modern  view  regarding  the 
sources,  the  nature,  and  the  criteria  of  knowledge  were  laid 
by  the  reflective  thinking  of  Descartes.  And  there  is  a  cer- 
tain warrant  in  the  facts  themselves  for  such  a  statement. 
For  it  has  been  shown  how  that  side  of  the  philosophizing  of 
Augustine  over  the  epistemological  problem  which,  in  spirit 
and  with  respect  to  the  significance  of  its  conclusions,  was 
opposed  to  the  trustful  attitude  of  Origen  toward  the  illu- 
mined reason  of  the  individual,  and  which  upheld  the  au- 
thority of  the  Church  against  free  critical  inquiry,  dominated 
the  doctrine  of  the  Middle  Ages.  Descartes,  indeed,  took  the 
appeal  away  from  this  tribunal  of  ecclesiastical  authority,  to 
that  which  holds  its  court  of  judgment  within  the  inmost 
recesses  of  every  man's  self-consciousness.  In  doing  so, 
however,  he  only  returned  to  the  other  and  better  side  of  the 
philosophizing  of  Augustine  himself.  Neither  in  acuteness 
of  analysis,  nor  in  clearness  and  beauty  of  statement,  nor 
especially  in  his  manner  of  finding  the  reality  of  the  soul,  of 
the  world,  and  of  God,  implicate  in  the  primary  act  of  cog- 
nition, was  the  founder  of  modern  philosophy  the  equal  of 
the  Church  Father.  Indeed,  we  fear  it  must  be  confessed 
that,  with  the  exception  of  Kant  and  Hume,  down  to 
very  recent  years,  modern  philosophy  has  not  been  much 
superior  to  ancient  philosophy  in  its  handling  of  the  most 
important  points  in  the  problem  of  knowledge.  Logic  and 


58  HISTORY  OF  OPINION 

psychology  have  greatly  flourished;  but  a  satisfying  episte- 
mology  has  been  less  promoted  thereby  than  it  would  seem 
reasonable  to  expect.  The  greater  freshness  and  naivete"  of 
those  earlier  times,  and  the  more  ardent  and  unconcealed 
interest  in  the  bearings  of  sceptical  and  agnostic  conclusions 
upon  the  concerns  of  ethics  and  religion,  make  the  thought  of 
antiquity  all  the  more  profitable  for  studious  consideration. 
The  most  distinguished  exception  to  this  disparaging  view 
of  modern  efforts  is,  of  course,  Immanuel  Kant.  He  was 
the  first  of  all  the  world's  thinkers  to  give  to  the  problem  of 
knowledge  a  formulated  construction;  to  attempt  the  follow- 
ing of  this  problem  through  many  winding  ways,  down  to 
its  lowest  depths  and  out  to  its  farthest  limits,  in  elaborate 
monographs;  and  so  to  set  his  answer  before  mankind  that 
thenceforth  its  immense  significance  and  portentous  claim 
could  never  fail  of  recognition.  Few  —  even  among  the 
ancient  and  mediaeval  teachers  of  the  Christian  Church  — 
had  more  upon  their  heart  and  conscience  the  practical  out- 
come of  the  attempt  at  a  settlement  of  the  problem.  Out- 
side of  what  leads  up  to,  and  of  what  has  flowed  from,  the 
Kantian  critique  of  knowledge,  there  is  little  to  add  to 
ancient  and  mediaeval  thinking,  by  way  of  profit  derived 
from  an  historical  sketch. 

Most  of  the  philosophical  works  of  Descartes  bear  upon  his 
attempt  to  construct  a  theory  of  knowledge.  His  "Rules 
for  the  Direction  of  the  Mind  "  is  perhaps  of  first  importance 
here;  while  the  "Discourse  on  Method "  is  more  obviously 
directed  to  the  same  end.  Some  of  the  more  impressive 
"Meditations"  concern  "Things  that  may  be  doubted,"  etc. 
The  posthumous  "  Recherches  de  la  Ve'rite'  "  deals,  as  its  title 
signifies,  with  similar  themes.  In  the  First  Part  of  the 
"  Principles  of  Philosophy  "  Descartes  discusses  the  founda- 
tions of  human  knowledge.  Both  his  "Treatise  on  the 
Passions"  and  his  "Treatise  on  Man"  occupy  themselves 
with  safeguarding  the  mind  against  error  and  assisting  it 


HISTORY  OF   OPINION  59 

in  the  ascertainment  of  truth ;  while  even  in  his  "  Treatise 
on  the  World,"  his  "Happy  Life  and  Summum  Bonum," 
and  in  many  of  his  "Letters,"  such  topics  as  truth,  error, 
knowledge,  and  the  validity  of  our  ideas,  are  continually 
brought  to  the  front.  That  there  is  a  philosophical  problem 
which  demands  inquiry  into  the  inmost  nature  and  the  neces- 
sary limits  of  knowledge,  Descartes  expressly  affirms.  No 
subject  of  investigation,  he  thinks,  can  be  more  important; 
indeed,  in  one  of  his  Rules  (No.  VIII.)  he  affirms,  "There  is 
here  a  question  which  a  man  must  examine,  at  least  once 
in  his  life,  if  he  love  the  truth. "  But  his  more  distinctive 
merit  lay  in  the  proposal  to  make  a  methodical  search  after 
a  science  of  man's  cognitive  faculty;  and  to  build  upon  the 
truth  revealed  by  this  search,  when  conducted  to  its  utmost 
possible  limits,  a  superstructure  of  truths  which  might  with- 
stand all  the  assaults  of  scepticism.  For  so  important  did 
Descartes  consider  method  in  inquiry  that  he  even  goes  to 
the  extreme  and  absurd  length  of  declaring  it  better  never 
to  discover  the  truth  than  not  to  use  method  in  its  discovery. 
It  is  quite  unnecessary  for  our  purpose  to  rehearse  the  well- 
known  Cartesian  tenets  which  have  a  bearing  upon  episte- 
mological  inquiry.  The  return  from  trust  in  the  principle 
of  external  authority  to  confidence  in  the  witness  whose  light 
shines  within  the  soul  of  every  man,  is  the  important  contri- 
bution which  Descartes  made  to  the  theory  of  knowledge  in 
its  more  modern  form.  This  inner  light  is  to  be  disclosed, 
however,  by  the  use  of  methodical  doubt.  In  the  primary 
fact  of  knowledge  —  the  cogito,  even  if  it  be  in  the  special 
form  of  a  dubito  —  the  self -known  reality  of  the  subject  of 
cognition,  and  the  implied  existence,  as  not-me,  of  the 
object  of  cognition,  are  both  to  be  discerned.  For  the  cogito, 
in  barbarous  Latin,  =cogitans  sum :  thinking  is  self-conscious 
being;  and  there  are  certain  forms  of  this  cogito  which,  when 
their  nature  as  mental  transactions  is  fully  discerned,  can- 
not be  accounted  for  otherwise  than  on  the  assumption  that 


60  HISTORY   OF  OPINION 

somewhat  other  than  the  thinking  subject  has  being  too. 
Among  those  ideas  which  demand  by  their  very  nature  an 
extra-mental  correlate,  the  idea  of  God  stands  eminent  and 
supreme.  It  appears,  as  of  its  own  evidence,  the  idea  of 
that  which  makes  irresistible  claim  to  be  really  existent.  It 
thus  becomes  the  bridge  of  Reality  between  the  indubitably 
self-cognizing  existence  of  the  soul  and  the  existence  of  the 
world  of  actual  things. 

The  several  gaps  in  that  Cartesian  argument  which  sets 
the  limits  and  establishes  the  validity  of  human  cognitive 
faculty  have  often  enough  been  pointed  out.  Of  it  all, 
only  two  things  remain,  forever  sure  and  unchanging  so 
long  as  the  fundamental  construction  of  man's  intellect 
remains  sure  and  unchanged :  these  are,  first,  the  rights  of 
methodical  doubt,  or  (to  use  a  more  modern  term)  of  a 
critical  self-examination  on  the  part  of  the  knower;  and, 
second,  the  necessity  for  acknowledging,  theoretically  as 
well  as  practically,  the  ultimate  limits  of  this  doubt  when, 
by  the  critical  process  itself,  we  stand  face  to  face  with  the 
implicates  of  every  act  of  knowing. 

It  was  a  hindrance  to  the  development  of  epistemology 
that  Descartes'  elaborate  doctrine  of  method,  with  the 
unwarrantable  hopes  and  perverse  trials  which  it  excited, 
became  so  influential  with  his  successors.  For  this  he  is 
himself  largely  to  blame.  He  was  always  a  dry  light,  with 
a  mind  better  adapted  for  mathematics  and  speculative 
physics  than  for  critical  philosophy.  His  most  admired 
type  of  investigation  was  the  mathematical  method,  as 
involving  "the  analysis  of  the  ancients,"  the  "algebra  of 
the  moderns,"  and  the  application  of  both  to  geometry.  The 
scope  of  this  method  he  considered  unlimited ;  and  for  it  he 
claimed  a  decided  superiority  over  all  other  methods,  as 
being  the  origin  and  source  of  all  truths.  In  fact,  however, 
the  entire  Cartesian  method,  as  employed  by  its  founder,  is, 
in  the  last  resort,  an  appeal  to  the  self-conscious  subject 


HISTORY  OF  OPINION  61 

of  all  the  states  of  knowledge.  The  final  test  of  all  truth 
is  "the  self-evidencing  conception  of  a  sound,  attentive 
mind."  Windelband1  is,  then,  justified  in  affirming  that 
the  disciples  of  Descartes  confounded  "the  relatively  free 
creative  activity  "  which  Descartes  himself  had  in  mind  (the 
analytical  method  as  he  pursued  it)  with  "the  rigidly  de- 
monstrative system  of  exposition  which  they  found  in 
Euclid's  text-book  of  geometry."  In  "all  the  change  of 
epistemological  investigations  until  far  into  the  eighteenth 
century,  this  conception  of  mathematics  was  a  firmly  estab- 
lished axiom  of  all  parties."  It  reached  its  culmination  in 
the  pantheism  of  Spinoza,  where,  without  previous  critical 
examination  of  the  underlying  assumptions  of  the  mind,  a 
logical  systemization  of  the  most  abstract  conceptions  more 
mathematico  is  identified  throughout  with  the  essential  truths 
respecting  the  really  Existent.  But  even  in  Spinoza's  case, 
the  purely  speculative  interests  were  not  left  wholly  without 
suggestion  and  control  on  the  part  of  the  practical  and  the 
religious.  And  at  the  last,  the  glow  of  that  love  which  is 
the  attitude  of  the  philosophical  mind  toward  the  Absolute 
One  warms  and  illumines  the  theorems  of  his  barren  and 
frozen  theological  geometry.  In  the  total  system,  side  by 
side  with  the  beginning  "Definition,"  "By  substance  I  un- 
derstand that  which  is  in  itself  and  is  conceived  through 
itself,"  stands  the  closing  axiomatic  "Proposition":  "He 
who  clearly  and  distinctly  understands  himself  and  his 
affects  loves  God,  and  better  loves  him  the  better  he  under- 
stands his  affects."  Thus  the  way  of  mathematical  demon- 
stration, on  the  unverified  and  uncritical  assumption  that 
conceptual  gymnastics  by  seizing  the  rope  let  down  by 
Euclid  can  climb  alone  to  the  heights  of  insight  into  Ab- 
solute Being,  has  become  the  way  of  salvation.  It  was  in 
more  simple  and  effective,  if  less  elaborate  fashion,  that 
Jacob  Boehme,  and  the  Mystics  generally,  controverted  and 

1  A  History  of  Philosophy,  p.  395. 


62  HISTORY  OF  OPINION 

abandoned  the  Cartesian  theory  of  knowledge.  With  them, 
as  with  Spinoza  at  the  last,  the  affectional  and  emotional 
interests  prevailed — through  help  of  the  stimulus  given  to 
claims  of  knowing  by  means  of  faith,  intuition,  and  the 
unreasoned  leap  to  the  seizure,  as  truth,  of  what  the  soul 
ardently  desires. 

It  was  the  Englishman  John  Locke  who  first  pursued  in 
more  elaborate  researches  the  psychological  path  to  the  prob- 
lem of  epistemology.  But  alas !  like  so  many  of  his  avowed 
or  unconscious  followers,  he  was  guilty  of  the  fallacy  which 
lies  in  the  supposition  —  even  now  so  widely  current  —  that 
a  survey  of  the  superficial  content  of  our  individual  cogni- 
tions, and  of  their  more  obvious  associations  and  logical 
relations,  is  a  sufficient  answer  to  the  quest  for  a  phi- 
losophy of  knowledge.  Thus  having  led  us  face  to  face  with 
the  problem,  he  leaves  both  us  and  it  hanging  in  mid-air. 
It  is  indeed  difficult  to  classify  Locke  with  respect  to  the 
position  which  he  assumes  toward  truly  epistemological 
questions.  It  is,  therefore,  easy  to  deny  that  it  is  either  the 
position  of  sensualism  or  the  position  of  idealistic  empiri- 
cism, or  that  of  unqualified  empiricism.1  The  epistemology 
of  Locke  is,  doubtless,  an  espousal  of  some  sort  of  empiri- 
cism ;  but  then  of  what  sort  ?  To  this  the  most  obvious 
answer  seems  to  be  that  he  never  clearly  comprehended  the 
inquiry  into  the  nature  of  knowledge  as  a  speculative  prob- 
lem, which  requires  an  analysis  that  goes  beyond  the  analysis 
of  descriptive  psychology  and  results  in  disclosing  and  test- 
ing the  ultimate  metaphysical  assumptions  implicate  in  all 
exercise  of  cognitive  function.  To  be  sure,  there  is  a  recog- 
nized problem  of  knowledge  in  pursuit  of  some  answer  to 
which  his  whole  course  of  investigation  conducts  him.  He 
is  induced  to  recognize  this  problem  by  following  out  his 
first  and  purely  psychological  inquiry,  —  namely,  as  to  the 

1  Thus  Grimm  denies  that  any  of  the  current  descriptions  is  satisfactory  as 
applied  to  Locke.  See  "  Zur  Geachichte  des  Erkenntnissproblems,"  p.  340. 


HISTORY  OF   OPINION  63 

rise  of  the  ideas  in  grounds  of  inner  experience.  Even  here, 
a  soul,  as  a  real  being  with  an  inherent  capacity  or  sus- 
ceptibility to  special  forms  of  excitement,  is  assumed  by 
Locke  from  the  first.  Certainly  the  founder  of  English  psy- 
chology was  very  far  from  intending  to  teach  a  science  of 
"psychology  without  a  soul." 

But  from  the  very  first,  too,  as  Locke  himself  assures  us 
in  his  own  account  of  what  led  to  his  investigations  "  Con- 
cerning Human  Understanding,"  and  of  what  he  hoped  to 
accomplish  by  these  investigations  (namely,  first,  to  "  inquire 
into  the  original  of  the  ideas;"  secondly,  "to  show  what 
knowledge  the  understanding  hath  by  those  ideas,  and  the 
certainty,  evidence,  and  extent  of  it;"  thirdly,  "to  make 
some  inquiry  into  the  nature  and  grounds  of  faith,  or 
opinion  "),*  there  is  a  goal  held  up  to  view  which  the  plain, 
historical  method  he  pursues  can  never  reach.  "Knowledge 
of  our  capacity  a  cure  of  scepticism  "  is  the  heading  of  one  of 
the  earlier  articles  of  his  book.  But  when  we  are  informed 
that,  besides  the  presentations  of  sense,  there  are  in  con- 
sciousness certain  other  ideas,  "originally  begotten,"  which 
proceed  from  the  operations  of  the  thinking  activity  itself, 
and  which  become  apprehended  by  reflection  upon  them,  the 
need  that  criticism  should  be  applied  to  these  ideas  is  ob- 
vious enough.  But  if  either  of  these  classes  of  ideas,  when 
- —  to  use  the  Lockean  expression  —  we  "become  conscious  of 
them,"  are  held  to  constitute  cognition  in  the  special  sense, 
then  the  problem  of  epistemology  is  upon  us  with  its  full 
force.  For  the  "  original  "  of  the  cognitions  is  drawn  from 
experience;  but  the  cognitions  contain  what  appears  to 
transcend  experience ;  and  thus  what  Locke  defines  as  "  the 
apprehension  of  the  agreement  or  non-agreement  of  our 
ideas  "  is,  as  yet,  not  cognition  at  all.  To  explain  its  being 
transmuted  into  cognition,  Locke  has  only  the  assumptions 
of  a  naive,  common-sense  realism.  His  account  of  "the 

1  Book  I.,  chap,  i.,  3. 


64  HISTORY  OF  OPINION 

origin,  certainty,  and  extent  of  human  knowledge  "  comes 
to  an  unsatisfactory  end  within  the  field  of  a  descriptive 
psychology.  It  never  becomes  a  truly  epistemological  affair ; 
for  it  never  bases  itself  upon  a  thorough  sceptical  inquiry 
and  critical  analysis  of  the  processes  and  postulates  of  all 
knowledge.  And  the  same  shirking  of  the  real  problem  of 
cognition,  under  cover  of  a  descriptive  psychology  or  a 
formal  logic,  has  characterized  the  work  of  English  writers 
almost  down  to  the  present  hour. 

Perhaps  the  most  important  contribution  which  Locke 
made  to  a  future  theory  of  knowledge  lay  in  the  emphasis 
he  placed  upon  a  distinction  between  the  primary  and  the 
secondary  qualities  of  things.  Berkeley,  while  pushing 
sceptical  inquiry  into  the  field  of  qualities  of  the  primary 
order,  the  cognition  of  which  was  with  Locke  a  kind  of  copy- 
ing-off  process,  still  confined  his  critical  philosophy  to  the 
nature  and  validity  of  sense-perception.  He  raised,  how- 
ever, one  forceful  question  in  such  a  way  as  henceforth  to 
allow  of  only  one  intelligent  answer.  How  shall  aught,  not 
in  reality  mentally  represented  or  mentally  representable, 
be  similar  to  that  which  is  mentally  represented  ?  What 
cannot  in  any  manner  or  degree  be  mentally  represented, 
that  cannot  in  any  manner  or  degree  be  cognized  as  really 
existent.  It  is  here  that  the  epistemological  problem  comes 
into  closest  contact  with  psychology. 

In  the  "  Siris  "  Berkeley  takes  the  position  that  phenomena 
—  apprehended  each  for  itself,  as  it  were  —  cannot  yield 
cognition.  Their  combination  through  rules  or  laws  is 
necessary  to  make  the  actual  world  intelligible;  and  the 
corresponding  combination  of  our  mental  representations 
is  necessary  to  make  cognition  possible.  To  be  perceived  is 
still  held  really  to  be;  but  now  we  are  informed  that  God  is 
the  ground  of  all  reality,  and  that  to  be  a  mode  of  his  law- 
abiding  spiritual  activity  is,  for  things,  really  to  be.  Thus 
those  things  which  formerly  seemed  to  constitute  collective 


HISTORY  OF  OPINION  65 

reality  are  known  to  be  only  fleeting  phantoms ;  God  is  the 
one  true  principle  of  unity,  of  identity,  and  of  existence. 
Knowledge  is,  then,  the  work  of  intellect  or  reason.  Sense 
and  experience  make  us  acquainted  with  the  course  and 
analogies  of  phenomena  (natural  events);  thinking,  reason, 
intellect,  brings  us  to  the  cognition  of  them  and  of  their 
causes. 

It  was,  however,  the  acutely  critical  activity  of  Hume 
which  began  to  give  to  the  problem  of  the  philosophy  of 
knowledge  its  more  nearly  modern  and  final  shape.  This 
critical  activity  was,  indeed,  most  effectively  directed 
toward  entangling  the  fundamental  concepts  of  human  cog- 
nition in  seemingly  hopeless  contradictions.  Nor  can  we 
agree  at  all  with  Riehl 1  in  attributing  to  the  Scottish  phi- 
losopher the  same  motif  as  that  which  stimulated  Kant,  — 
namely,  to  lay  the  foundations  of  cognition  for  practical 
purposes  more  securely  in  rational  faith.  From  the  nega- 
tive and  destructive  effort  of  Hume,  however,  came  a  most 
important  positive  result.  It  was  made  clearer  that  cer- 
tainty, and  true  knowledge  as  always  implying  certainty,  is 
not  attainable  through  mere  thinking,  or  concepts.  From  the 
psychological  point  of  view  Hume  inquires,  much  more 
acutely  and  fundamentally  than  did  Locke,  into  the  "cer- 
tainty "  as  well  as  the  "  origin  "  of  human  knowledge.  It  is 
perhaps  not  incorrect,  then,  to  speak  of  Hume  as  the  first  to 
develop  a  critical  theory  of  knowledge  out  of  the  Lockean 
psychology  of  ideas.  His  supreme  effort  was  to  show  how, 
admitting  that  criticism  of  the  content  of  consciousness  must 
lead  us  to  scepticism  concerning  the  reality  of  our  knowl- 
edge, nevertheless  the  appearance,  the  conviction,  of  real 
knowledge  arises  as  a  matter  of  fact.  Thus  he  aims  at  a 
complete  psychological  account  of  the  origin  of  cognition, 
as  comprising  those  beliefs  and  ontological  postulates  which 
practically  defy  the  assaults  of  a  theoretical  criticism. 

1  Der  Philosophische  Kriticismus,  I.,  pp.  66  f. ;  but  compare  p.  69. 

5 


66  HISTORY  OF  OPINION 

In  Hume's  account  of  the  nature  and  process  of  knowledge, 
however,  nearly  everything  is  superficial  and  merely  descrip- 
tive ;  while  the  shifty  and  loose  use  which  he  makes  of  the 
conception  of  "experience"  tends  to  constant  confusion. 
All  cognition,  he  holds,  arises  from  one  of  two  sources, 
and  so  may  be  divided  into  two  kinds — cognition  arising 
immediately  from  ideas,  and  cognition  arising  from  experi- 
ence. l  In  working  up  —  so  to  speak  —  the  material  which 
originates  in  these  sources,  Hume  emphasizes  the  imagina- 
tion. According  to  three  points  of  view,  this  faculty  is 
wont  to  bind  together  the  passively  received  ideas.  These 
points  of  view  not  only  form  the  rules  according  to  which 
imagination  actively  combines  the  ideas ;  they  also  give  the 
relations  which  the  mind  recognizes  as  existing  between 
things.  They  enter,  at  least  partially,  into  the  constitution 
of  that  object  which  rests  upon  experience,  and  which  can, 
therefore,  never  attain  an  unconditioned  certainty.  These 
three  points  of  view  give  (1)  resemblance,  (2)  contiguity  in 
space  and  time,  and  (3)  causality,  as  the  relations  under 
which  this  combining  activity  of  imagination  makes  the 
objects  of  cognition  to  appear  in  the  guise  of  realities.  Two 
of  these  three  classes  of  relations  —  identity  and  the  rela- 
tions of  space  and  time  —  consist  essentially  in  a  passive 
reception  of  impressions  through  the  organs  of  sense.  But 
the  relation  of  cause  and  effect  carries  us  beyond  the  im- 
mediate perception  of  the  senses,  and  presupposes  a  cer- 
tain further  process  which  perfects  itself  within  the  mind. 
Here  the  distinctive  part  of  Hume's  theory  of  knowledge 
comes  to  the  front.  This  process,  which  gives  objects  to 
experience  as  real  and  causally  related,  is  a  process  of 
feeling  and  imagination,  and  not  a  process  of  reason.  It 
is  an  act  of  the  sensitive  part  of  our  nature  rather  than  an 
act  of  thinking.  Imagination,  then,  as  the  lively  potency 
of  ideas  in  combination,  is  the  faculty  in  which  Hume  lays 

1  Treatise,  I.,  iii.,  section  1  f. 


HISTORY  OF  OPINION  67 

the  foundation  of  cognition.  Memory,  sense,  intellect,  all 
have  their  basis  in  imagination,  which  imparts  lifelikeness 
to  the  ideas,  and  so  constitutes  the  bridge  between  mere 
subjectivity  and  what  we  consider  a  real  world  of  things.1 
This  potency  itself  has  its  root  in  a  sort  of  blind  emotion  on 
which  our  intellect  can  throw  some  light,  but  which  it  is 
powerless  either  to  beget  or  to  destroy.  Feeling,  therefore, 
is  shown  to  be  the  ultimate  foundation  of  all  cognition.2 

As  to  limits,  it  follows  that,  in  the  strict  meaning  of  the 
word,  our  knowledge  cannot  reach  beyond  that  of  numbers 
and  magnitudes,  and  a  knowledge  of  facts.  The  latter,  how- 
ever, may  be  either  knowledge  of  particular  facts  or  knowl- 
edge of  general  facts,  —  that  is,  such  as  have  to  do  with  the 
properties,  causes,  and  effects  of  an  entire  species  of  objects. 
In  one  class  we  may  place  the  results  of  our  investigations 
into  history,  chronology,  geography,  astronomy;  in  another 
class,  such  studies  as  politics,  and  the  philosophy  of  nature, 
consisting  of  chemistry,  physics,  etc.  Ethics  and  aesthetics 
are  matters  of  feeling  or  taste.3 

In  the  attempt  to  validate  our  knowledge  we  see  at  once, 
Hume  thinks,  that  one  kind  — namely,  knowledge  immediatelv 
from  ideas  —  has  a  perfect  certainty  ;  since  the  relations  of 
the  ideas  admit  of  face-to-face  inspection,  or  envisagement,  as 
it  were.  Its  type  is  the  knowledge  of  algebra,  arithmetic,  and 
geometry.  But  cognition  from  experience,  or  a  knowledge  of 
general  facts  by  means  of  the  principle  of  causality,  has  only 
a  "  moral "  certainty.  In  the  last  analysis,  then,  as  we  see 
again,  certainty  does  not  repose  at  all  on  rational  grounds, 
but  on  grounds  of  imagination  and  feeling.  We  are  com- 
pelled "according  to  nature"  to  apprehend,  or  rather  to 
be  impressed  with  certain  ideas,  rather  than  others,  in  a 
peculiarly  strong  and  vivid  manner.  If  we  surrender  our- 

1  Treatise,  I.,  iii.,  section  8  f. ;  Inquiry,  section  5  ;  Treatise,  I.,  iv.,  section  2  f. 

2  Treatise,  I.,  iv.,  section  7. 
8  Inquiry,  section  12. 


68  HISTORY  OF  OPINION 

selves  to  a  complete  trust  in  intellect,  and  try  to  reason 
ourselves  into  knowledge,  we  have  no  other  device  than  the 
choice  between  false  reason,  utter  scepticism,  and  a  return 
to  unreasoning  fa.ith.  It  thus  becomes  a  necessity  of  practical 
life  to  cherish  certain  cognitions. 

Few  thinkers  have  had,  more  than  Hume,  the  fate  of  influ- 
encing the  reflections  of  their  successors,  by  way  of  suggesting 
and  stimulating  new  endeavors  and  new  resulting  views, 
while  at  the  same  time  themselves  meeting  'with  almost 
universal  and  even  scornful  and  vituperative  rejection.  Hume 
cannot,  indeed,  be  regarded  as  a  serious,  though  sceptical  and 
critical,  inquirer  after  a  doctrine  of  cognition,  in  the  fashion 
of  a  Descartes  or  a  Kant,  or  even  of  his  own  more  immediate 
predecessor,  Locke.  At  the  same  time  it  is  doubtful  whether 
any  one  in  modern  times,  with  the  single  exception  of  Kant, 
whom  he  stimulated  and  to  whom  he  handed  over  his  central 
problem,  has  made  more  important  positive  contributions  to 
a  theory  of  knowledge  than  those  which  may  be  gathered  from 
the  writings  of  this  philosopher.  A  modern  writer *  on  the  his- 
tory of  this  theory  has  declared  that  Hume  ends  by  doing 
away  with  all  important  distinctions  between  human  reason 
and  brute  instinct ;  and,  indeed,  that  thus  he  does  away  with 
knowledge  altogether.  The  critical  part  of  our  investigation, 
however,  will  make  it  apparent  that  knowledge  is  impossible 
for  man  without  admitting  the  validating  force  of  those  men- 
tal attitudes,  or  activities,  which  are  closely  akin  to  what  we 
so  vaguely  call  "  instinct "  in  the  lower  animals.  And  they 
who  make  knowledge  purely  a  matter  of  intellectualizing ,  and 
who  disregard  what  is  contributed  by  imagination,  feeling, 
and  will,  do  away  with  real  knowledge,  as  men  actually  have 
it  in  the  concrete,  warm,  practical  life  of  work-a-day  experi- 
ence, quite  as  completely  as  does  the  sceptical  theory  of 
Hume.  Moreover,  in  concentrating  attention  upon  the  syn- 
thetic force  of  blind  imagination,  in  emphasizing  the  value 

1  Grimm,  Zur  Geschichte  dea  Erkenntnissproblems,  p.  557. 


HISTORY   OF  OPINION  69 

aud  necessity  of  unreasoning  beliefs,  in  holding  that  the 
intellectual  use  of  the  causal  principle  can  never  of  itself 
serve  as  a  bridge  between  the  subjective  world  and  things- 
in-themselves,  and  in  concluding  that  our  choice  of  certain 
practical  postulates  will  be  necessary  in  the  last  resort  to 
validate  our  cognitions,  what  did  Hume  do  but  anticipate 
much  which  Kant  subsequently  elaborated  in  detail  ?  And 
as  to  mannep  of  saying  it,  we  are  obliged  not  infrequently  to 
ascribe  the  greater  merit  to  the  Scottish  rather  than  to  the 
German  thinker.  Fortunately,  or  unfortunately,  Hume's  more 
prominent  opponents  in  his  own  country,  the  Scottish  Realists, 
had  not  the  insight  to  see  what  advantages  were  offered  to 
them  in  their  advocacy  of  ethical  and  religious  truths,  if, 
while  pointing  out  the  insufficiency  of  his  sceptical  analysis 
of  the  data  of  consciousness,  they  made  good  use  of  its  several 
positive  conclusions.  And  so,  the  rather,  they  abandoned 
investigation  into  a  really  critical  theory  of  knowledge,  and 
made  a  bid  for  popular  favor  in  the  form  of  a  naive  and 
uncritical  return  to  the  position  of  Realism. 

With  Leibnitz  the  epistemological  problem  is  never  pri- 
mary ;  the  nature  of  substance  is  his  primary  and  all-impor- 
tant problem.  It  is  not  until  about  1684  that  we  find  in  his 
writings  any  clear  recognition  of  the  existence  of  such  a 
problem.  Both  before  and  after  this  date,  what  with  Des- 
cartes was  a  criterion  of  truth  becomes  with  Leibnitz  an 
ontological  predicate.  Leibnitz  was  at  first  one  of  the  most 
consistent  supporters  of  the  prevalent  view  which  made 
mathematics  the  type  of  all  genuine  cognition.  He  was 
jesting,  indeed,  in  his  "  Specimen  Demonstrationum  ; "  but  he 
was  seriously  of  the  opinion  that  philosophical  controversies 
ought  to  end  in  a  philosophy  which  could  state  its  conclusions 
in  as  clear  and  certain  a  form  as  that  employed  by  mathe- 
matical calculation.1  Hence  arose  his  thought  of  writing 
out  the  results  of  reflective  thinking  in  general  formulas, 

1  See  "De  Scientia  Universal!  sea  Calcalo  Philosophico,"  1684. 


70  HISTORY  OF  OPINION 

more  geometrico.  Hence  also  his  idea  of  the  distinction 
between  eternal  truths  and  truths  of  fact  (verites  eternelles 
and  verites  de  fait).  The  former  need  no  proof,  are  in- 
tuited as  true  in  themselves,  as  "  first  truths "  or  "  prime 
possibilities." 

As  to  the  nature  of  knowledge,  Leibnitz's  position  is  largely 
determined  by  the  leading  motive  in  all  his  philosophical 
thinking,  which  is  the  reconciliation  of  the  mechanical  and 
the  teleological  views  of  the  world,  so  as  to  unite  the  scien- 
tific and  the  religious  interests  of  his  age.  To  this  end  the 
important  principle  was  announced  and  expounded :  "  Sub- 
stance is  a  being  capable  of  action."  This  principle,  although 
ontological  in  its  character,  could  not  fail  to  have  a  most 
important  bearing  upon  the  epistemological  problem.  By 
it  the  Cartesian  co-ordination  of  the  two  attributes  of  sub- 
tance  (extensio  and  cogitatio)  was  again  abolished  :  the  world 
of  consciousness  becomes  the  truly  actual ;  the  world  of  ex- 
tension is  phenomenon.  Thus  Leibnitz  "  sets  the  intelligible 
world  of  substances  over  against  the  phenomena  of  the  senses, 
or  material  world,  in  a  completely  Platonic  fashion." 1  Sub- 
stance becomes  a  unity  in  plurality,  after  the  pattern  of  the 
self-cognizing  unitary  being  of  mind  ;  and  space  and  time 
both  belong  to  mental  being.  Even  the  deeper  sense  and 
justification  of  the  ambiguity  into  which  his  doctrine  of  the 
monads,  each  one  "  representing "  the  world  of  reality,  be- 
trays him,  as  Windelband  declares,  has  its  truth  "  in  the 
fact  that  we  cannot  form  any  clear  and  distinct  idea  whatever 
of  the  unifying  of  the  manifold,  except  after  the  pattern  of 
that  kind  of  connection  which  we  experience  within  ourselves 
in  the  function  of  consciousness." 

It  was  mainly  the  criticism  of  Locke  which  compelled  Leib- 
nitz to  develop  a  theory  of  knowledge.  Concerning  the 
source  of  knowledge,  he  attempts  a  middle  way  between  the 
positions  of  sensualism  and  the  high-and-dry  a  priori  theory. 
1  Compare  Nouveaux  Essais,  iv.,  3,  §§  20  f. 


HISTORY  OF  OPINION  71 

It  is  here  that  his  conception  of  unconscious  representations, 
or  petites  perceptions,  arises.1  The  further  important  dis- 
tinction is  made  between  states  in  which  the  mind  merely 
has  ideas,  and  those  in  which  it  is  conscious  of  having  them ; 
that  is,  between  "  perception  "  and  "  apperception."  By  the 
latter  he  understands  "  the  process  by  which  the  unconscious, 
confused  and  obscure  representations  are  raised  into  clear 
and  distinct  consciousness,  and  are  thereby  recognized  by 
the  soul  as  its  own.  and  thus  are  appropriated  by  self-con- 
sciousness." The  distinguishing  activity  of  the  mind  as  cog- 
nitive, the  genetic  process  which  conditions  the  unfolding  of 
the  psychical  life,  is  the  taking  up  of  perceptions  into  apper- 
ceptions.2 The  "  innate  ideas,"  which  with  Leibnitz  are, 
like  the  categories  of  Kant,  forms  of  the  functioning  of  in- 
tellect in  its  unification  of  knowledge,  are  implicit  in  the  petites 
perceptions,  as  the  involuntary  forms  of  relating  activity. 

As  to  the  validating  of  knowledge,  Leibnitz  would  have  us 
distinguish  two  kinds  of  intuitive  cognitions.  Here  he  fol- 
lows a  distinction  as  old  as  Aristotle ;  but  both  kinds  of 
intuition  must  possess  the  Cartesian  marks  of  clearness 
and  distinctness.  Then  in  the  case  of  one  form,  intuitive 
certainty  reposes  upon  the  principle  of  contradiction ;  in 
the  other  form,  the  possibility  guaranteed  by  perception  of  the 
actual  fact  needs  still  an  explanation  in  accordance  with  the 
principle  of  sufficient  reason.  This  distinction  has  reference, 
however,  only  to  the  human  understanding.  For  the  divine 
understanding,  empirical  truths,  too,  are  so  grounded  that 
the  opposite  is  impossible,  although  it  remains  thinkable  for 
us.  More  and  more,  nevertheless,  did  this  antithesis  between 
necessary  and  contingent  truths  gain  with  Leibnitz  an  onto- 
logical  significance.  God's  being  is  an  eternal  truth ;  finite 
things  are  contingent  and  exist  only  in  dependence  upon  the 
principle  of  sufficient  reason. 

1  Monadology,  sections  14  and  21. 

2  Principes  de  la  Nature  et  de  la  Grace,  4 ;  Nouv.  Ess.  II.,  ix.  4. 


72  HISTORY  OF  OPINION 

In  spite  of  the  unsystematic  thinking  of  Leibnitz,  and  of 
the  fact  that  an  elaborate  and  self-conscious  theory  of  cog- 
nition never  was  wrought  out  by  him,1  he  strengthened  one 
or  two  truths  of  immense  epistemological  importance.  With 
him,  sensibility  and  intellect  are  not  separate  powers  or  dis- 
tinct sources  of  knowledge  ;  they  are  at  most  different  stages 
of  one  and  the  same  living  activity  with  which  the  monad 
soul  represents,  and  comprehends  as  it  represents,  the  uni- 
verse within  itself.  Nor  are  the  world  of  soul  and  the  world 
of  the  really  existent  conceived  of  as  having  a  "  great  gulf 
fixed "  between  them,  over  which  some  bridge  other  than 
the  perfect,  living  activity  of  the  soul  itself  must  be  thrown 
in  order  to  make  possible  a  meeting  of  these  two  disparate 
worlds.  The  monad  knows  the  world  because  its  own  self- 
known  life  mirrors  the  world ;  its  activity  is  the  law  of  the 
world  ;  its  mirroring  is  no  passive  reflection  of  dead  and 
inert  forms  of  existence,  but  an  active  and  voluntary  ideating. 
We  are  not  left  where  Hume  left  us,  to  conclude  by  force 
of  a  doubtful  use  of  a  principle  which  itself  defies  the  powers 
of  reason  to  comprehend  or  to  justify  it ;  in  its  own  life  the 
soul  envisages  force  ;  and  the  very  principle  of  all  concluding 
is  itself  the  ontological  law  of  the  life  of  the  really  existent. 

The  claim  has  been  made  that  the  "  Nouveaux  Essais  "  of 
Leibnitz  stimulated  Kant  to  build  up  its  doctrine  into  a  sys- 
tem of  epistemology.  Whether  this  claim  be  historically 
true  or  not,  there  can  be  no  doubt  that  the  lines  which  had 
been  followed  by  the  problems  and  answers  belonging  to  the 
philosophy  of  knowledge,  through  both  Leibnitz  and  Hume, 
united  in  Kant.  To  the  lonely  thinker  of  Koenigsberg  it  was 
given,  first  among  men,  to  plan  and  to  attempt  the  critique 
of  human  cognition  in  a  manner  which  left  the  impress  of 
his  thinking  upon  both  problem  and  its  answer  to  the  end 
of  time. 

1  He  has  himself  meditated  concerning  the  foundations  of  knowledge.  "  None 
are  more  important,"  he  says  in  his  "  First  Reflections  on  Locke's  Essay." 


HISTORY  OF  OPINION  73 

The  space  which  can  be  given  in  this  historical  sketch  to 
the  Kantian  doctrine  of  the  nature,  origin,  limits,  and  criteria 
of  knowledge  bears  no  proportion  to  the  importance  of  this 
doctrine  in  its  influence  upon  the  reflective  thinking  of  mod- 
ern times.  Certain  points  will  be  briefly  stated ;  for  the 
common  proof  of  which  only  the  painstaking  and  thorough 
study  of  Kant  can  be,  in  this  connection,  adduced.  For,  con- 
trary to  the  somewhat  widely  prevalent  view,  there  are  few 
great  philosophical  writings  in  whose  case  single  citations, 
if  not  taken  in  connection  with  prolonged  study  of  the  entire 
circle  of  the  same  author's  writings,  carry  so  little  weight  as 
do  citations  from  the  three  Critiques  of  Kant. 

First  of  all,  in  respect  of  several  most  important  points 
Kant  cannot  be  reconciled  with  himself.  How  so  thoroughly 
sincere,  patient,  and  penetrating  a  thinker  could  involve  him- 
self in  such  patent  inconsistencies,  we  have  probably  lost  the 
historical  clues  which  might  possibly  enable  us  to  tell  in  detail. 
Although  the  "  Critique  of  Pure  Reason  "  was  so  long  and 
thoroughly  excogitated  and  so  quickly  written,  and  although 
all  three  of  the  critical  masterpieces  were  written  at  so  late 
a  period  in  the  life  of  their  author  as  to  secure  for  them  his 
maturer  powers,  they  bear  manifold  marks  that  he  had  not 
thought  himself  all  the  way  clearly  and  thoroughly  through. 
Nor  is  this  deficiency  surprising  in  view  of  the  magnitude  of 
the  task  undertaken,  of  its  essentially  pioneer  character  (at 
least  in  the  Kantian  form),  and  of  the  splendor  of  the  work 
actually  accomplished.  Nevertheless,  the  ambiguities  and  in- 
consistencies of  Kant  are  too  numerous  and  too  important 
ever  successfully  to  be  denied. 

But,  second,  the  deeper  purpose  of  Kant  remained  from  the 
beginning  to  the  end  of  his  critical  era  one  and  the  same ; 
and  this  purpose  was,  by  reconciling  the  two  great  schools  as 
to  the  sources  of  knowledge,  and  thus  by  offering  an  explana- 
tion of  the  nature  of  knowledge  which  should  have  "  sun- 
clear  "  truth  for  every  one  who  once  really  understood  it,  to 


T4  HISTORY  OF  OPINION 

set  irremovable  limits  to  the  pretence  of  knowledge  and  to 
clear  the  ground  from  it,  in  order  to  make  room  for  the 
practical  postulates  of  the  life  of  conduct  and  of  religion. 
The  "  Critique  of  Practical  Reason,"  with  its  discovery  of  the 
lost  truths  of  Freedom,  God,  and  Immortality,  was  no  after- 
thought with  Kant.  On  the  contrary,  it  was  from  the  begin- 
ning his  chief  concern. 

Two  or  three  pervasive  causes  of  defect  and  of  inconclusive- 
ness  should  also  be  borne  in  mind  in  all  study  of  Kant's 
treatment  of  the  epistemological  problem.  He,  as  is  well 
known,  constantly  depreciates  the  influence  of  psychology 
(or  the  physiology  of  mind)  upon  a  satisfactory  epistemologi- 
cal doctrine.  He  wishes  to  keep  his  critique  independent  of 
all  doubtful  opinion  regarding  the  descriptive  and  explana- 
tory science  of  cognitions.  It  must  be  constructed  of  a  purity, 
of  a  universally  and  necessarily  convincing  character,  which 
shall  correspond  to  the  purity  and  the  necessary  character 
of  the  elements  criticised.  But  such  an  attempt  to  divorce 
the  theory  of  knowledge  from  a  critical  opinion  upon  mooted 
questions  in  the  psychology  of  knowledge  is  impossible  of 
execution.  The  defective  psychological  basis  of  Kant  is  the 
cause  of  many  important  fallacies  in  his  critical  system. 

Certain  naive  assumptions  of  Kant  —  for  example,  as  to 
the  satisfactory  character  of  the  Aristotelian  logic ;  as  to  the 
nature  of  the  so-called  a  priori  concepts  in  general,  and  of 
mathematical  concepts  in  particular ;  as  to  a  "  pure  science  " 
of  physics ;  and  as  to  the  possibility  of  setting  forth  in  demon- 
strative form  the  results  of  a  critical  estimate  of  cognitive 
faculty  —  are  themselves  in  need  of  being  subjected  to  the 
severest  criticism.  To  do  this,  as  has  often  been  remarked,  is 
to  follow  our  leader  in  the  spirit,  if  not  in  the  letter  of  his 
system  of  thinking.  Especially  must  inquiry  be  pressed  into 
the  sources  and  validity  of  those  ontological  postulates  which 
are  so  grudgingly  admitted  in  the  "  Critique  of  Pure  Reason," 
and  so  generously  but  unwarrantably  introduced  into  the 


HISTORY  OF  OPINION  75 

"  Critique  of  Practical  Reason."  But  about  all  such  dissent 
from  Kant  we  refrain  from  anticipating  further  the  course  of 
our  own  epistemological  discussion.  Enough  has  been  said 
to  indicate  his  claims  to  precedence  beyond  all  predecessors 
or  successors  in  this  field.  They  are :  (1)  the  clear  and 
comprehensive  way  in  which  he  conceives  of  his  problem ; 
(2)  the  thoroughness  with  which  he  employs  the  critical 
method  as  a  matter  of  fundamental  principle ;  (3)  the  defin- 
itively ethical  purpose  which,  although  often  for  a  time  ob- 
scured, is  really  present  arid  dominant  from  beginning  to 
end  of  the  critical  inquiry. 

It  has  often  been  pointed  out  that  Kant,  by  his  critique  of 
human  cognitive  faculty,  intended  to  mediate  between  the 
extremes  of  dogmatism  and  scepticism.1  The  position  of  the 
dogmatist,  who  regards  transcendental  truth  as  attainable 
only  by  some  sort  of  copying-off  process,  he  overthrows  with 
the  denial  that  the  universal  and  necessary  quality  which 
such  truth  possesses  could  in  this  way  be  given  to  it  at  all. 
But  he  likewise  intends  to  destroy  that  kind  of  scepticism 
which  persistently  overlooks  such  universal  and  necessary 
quality;  and  this  he  will  do  by  showing  how  it  is  just  this 
quality  which  makes  any  cognition  possible.  Thus  the 
Kantian  theory  of  knowledge  appears  before  us  as  a  living 
and  inner  combination  of  the  two  opposed  theories  held, 
respectively,  by  Wolff  and  by  Hume.  Sense  and  intellect, 
intuition  and  concept,  are  both  necessary  to  knowledge. 
Without  intuition  concepts  are  empty,  without  conception 
sense  is  blind.  The  real  thought  safeguarded  here  is  illumi- 
nating, and  widely  extends  our  view  of  the  nature  and  limits 
of  human  knowledge.  But,  alas,  the  truth  of  the  postulates 
which  secure  the  central  positions  of  dogmatic  and  rational 
realism  is  nowhere  treated  by  Kant  to  a  thorough  criticism ;  in 

1  See,  especially,  his  expressed  intention  "  to  steer  reason  safely  between  these 
two  rocks,"  —  the  dogmatism  of  Locke  and  the  scepticism  of  Hume.  (K.  d.  R. 
V.  (2d  ed.)  Analytic,  chap,  ii.,  sec.  i.  §  14.) 


76  HISTORY  OF  OPINION 

the  "  Critique  of  Pure  Reason,"  it  is  scarcely  even  brought  to 
mind.  Then,  too,  those  suggestions  with  regard  to  the  entire 
nature  and  full  import  of  knowledge,  with  which  the  scepti- 
cism of  Hume  is  so  rich,  are  not  made  use  of,  so  as  to  set 
the  author  of  the  three  critiques  himself  free  from  the  limi- 
tations of  his  own  dogmatic  rationalizing.  For  Kant's  world 
of  reality  is  cold  and  formal ;  as  a  world  of  work-a-day  things, 
it  lacks  heart  and  will ;  and  even  as  a  world  of  conduct  in 
pursuit  of  ideals,  its  postulates  consist  rather  of  a  system  of 
impersonal  laws  than  of  a  social  community,  striving  and 
counter-striving  with  reference  to  some  far-off  and  dimly 
descried  end  of  attainable  good. 

Instructive  as  it  would  be,  we  cannot  here  follow  the  scat- 
tered indications  which  show  how  the  critical  philosophy  of 
Kant  probably  took  shape  in  his  own  mind.  The  Disserta- 
tion of  1770  is  still  dogmatic  with  regard  to  the  problem  of 
knowledge  ;  it  assumes  uncritically  a  correspondence  between 
the  world  of  concepts  and  the  world  of  objective  real  things. 
It  was  to  account  for  this  correspondence,  as  growing  out  of 
the  inmost  nature  of  cognitive  faculty,  that  the  critical  phi- 
losophy was  undertaken.  As  we  learn  from  his  letters  writ- 
ten to  Herz  in  1772,  the  "Transcendental  Logic"  is  the 
thing  on  which  Kant  worked  for  ten  years  or  more.  The 
answer  which  comes  forth  as  the  product  of  so  much  travail 
of  intellect  is,  in  brief,  this :  The  judging  faculty,  with  its 
twelve  forms  of  functioning  (the  a  priori  concepts  of  under- 
standing, the  categories)  produces  the  world  of  objective 
real  things  in  the  unity  of  consciousness.  This  doctrine  of 
the  absolute  dependence  of  all  objects  of  experience  upon  the 
constitutional  forms  of  the  functioning  of  intellect,  in  the 
unity  of  consciousness,  is  the  Kantian  discovery.  It  was 
upon  the  basis  of  this  discovery  that  he  himself  claimed  to 
be  the  Copernicus  of  epistemological  science.  But  we  shall 
soon  be  made  to  see  that  the  way  in  which  its  author  states 
his  great  discovery,  together  with  the  unwarrantable  infer- 


HISTORY  OF  OPINION  77 

ence  which  he  draws  from  it,  lands  us  inextricably  in  a  posi- 
tion of  sceptical  and  agnostic  idealism. 

In  the  development  of  his  great  epistemological  thesis, 
especially  in  the  "  Critique  of  Pure  Reason,"  Kant  states  the 
problem  in  several  different  and  somewhat  confusing  ways. 
Among  these,  as  the  most  definite  proposal  for  a  science  of 
science,  he  affirms  that  he  is  aiming  at  a  critique  of  all  knowl- 
edge a  priori,  —  that  is,  of  all  those  universal  and  necessary 
factors  of  knowledge  for  which  definite  and  concrete  experi- 
ences, as  such,  do  not  account.  "  Philosophy  requires  a 
science  to  determine  a  priori  the  possibility,  the  principles, 
and  the  extent  of  all  knowledge." 1  Surely  the  world  needs 
to  see  that  "  there  can  be  a  special  science  serving  as  a  cri- 
tique of  pure  reason ; "  and  that  there  should  precede  all 
attempts  at  metaphysics  a  "  critique  of  pure  reason,  its 
sources,  and  limits,  as  a  kind  of  preparation  for  a  complete 
system  of  pure  reason."  But  again,  the  broader  question  is 
proposed  as  the  topic  for  critical  investigation  :  How  is  expe- 
rience at  all  possible  ?  Yet  again,  the  great  problem  is  stated 
in  form  more  deferential  to  the  students  of  mathematics  and 
physics  :  How  is  pure  science  possible,  —  (a)  mathematics, 
and  (ft)  physics  ?  And  why  do  men  so  persistently  follow  the 
attempt  at  a  science  of  metaphysics,  in  spite  of  the  un- 
doubted fact  that  the  issue  of  all  such  attempt  is  only  the 
unverifiable  appearance  of  such  a  science  ?  Yet  once  more 
the  problem  is  proposed  in  that  form,  nearer  to  the  logician's 
heart,  in  which  Kant  so  early  began  to  reflect  upon  it :  How 
is  it  possible  that  we  should  frame  synthetic  judgments  which 
have  universal  and  necessary  validity  ? 

In  all  the  various  ways  which  Kant  adopts  for  stating  the 
epistemological  problem,  there  is  something  common ;  and 
this  common  part  comprises  the  essential  puzzle  of  a  critical 
epistemology.  For  whether  I  know  things  immediately  by 
sense-perception  (or  intuition,  to  use  the  Kantian  term),  or 

1  New  headings  in  the  introduction  to  the  second  edition,  No.  III. 


78  HISTORY   OF  OPINION 

know  about  them  by  processes  of  reasoning  that  rest  back 
upon  observation  through  the  senses,  I  am  alike  persuaded 
that  my  consciousness  is  somehow  put  in  possession  of  the 
truth  of  things.  For  knowledge  that  does  not  carry  convic- 
tion of  putting  us  into  possession  of  the  truth  of  things,  men 
decline  to  call  knowledge  at  all.  Experience  is  attained ; 
science  is  cultivated  and  increased ;  knowledge  grows  by 
rising  through  higher  and  higher  forms  of  synthesis  toward 
an  ideal  unity  ;  but  all  this,  from  the  psychologist's  point  of 
view,  is  subjective,  is  only  a  succession  of  more  and  yet  more 
complex  and  contentful  states  of  consciousness.  And  yet  the 
moment  we  consider  this  as  knowledge,  it  is  something  more  ; 
it  is  the  progressively  perfect  and  comprehensive  seizure  by 
the  human  mind  of  the  objective  universe,  the  increasingly 
exact  and  detailed  correspondence  of  the  flowing  stream  of 
man's  consciousness  with  the  being  and  the  movement  of  the 
world  of  things.  How  can  this  be  ?  Only,  Kant  answers, 
because  this  world  of  objective  reality  is  the  construct  of  the 
cognitive  intellect  itself,  functioning  in  all  its  different  con- 
stitutional forms,  but  always  in  the  unity  of  the  one  unfolding 
conscious  life. 

We  shall  not  attempt  to  follow  Kant  into  the  details  with 
which  he  laboriously  furnishes  us  thoughout  the  first  two 
Parts  of  the  "  Critique  of  Pure  Reason."  Our  positions  both 
of  consent  and  of  dissent  will  be  taken  in  the  subsequent 
chapters,  for  the  most  part  without  reference  to  him.  Two 
or  three  main  points  of  agreement  and  also  of  divergence  may, 
however,  be  noted  in  this  historical  sketch.  In  his  attempt 
at  reconciling  the  claims  of  the  exclusively  sensational  and 
the  exclusively  intellectual  theories  of  knowledge,  Kant  set 
forth  more  fully  than  had  any  one  else  the  complicated  and 
combined  uses  of  faculty  in  all  our  cognition  of  external 
things.  Such  cognition  implies,  (1)  the  arousement  of  the 
sensitive  side  of  mind  in  response  to  stimulation  from  with- 
out (receptivity  of  sensibility)  ;  (2)  the  combining  activity  of 


HISTORY  OF  OPINION  79 

image-making  faculty  (synthesis  of  imagination  —  a  much 
truer  statement  of  the  actual  facts  of  consciousness  than  all 
talk  of  mere  passive  "  aggregation  "  and  "  agglomeration,"  or 
even  of  "  association  "  of  sensations  and  ideas) ;  and  (3)  the 
exercise  of  judgment  in  one  or  more  of  its  various  forms  of 
functioning.  Without  justifying  the  abstract  and  separatist 
fashion  in  which  this  schematizing  is  wrought  out,  we,  too, 
believe  that  cognition  of  things  is  impossible  without  the 
so-called  faculties  of  sense,  imagination,  and  intellect,  all 
being  called  forth  and  developed  in  their  living  unity.  And 
it  is  not  so  much  the  complicated  nature  of  the  Kantian 
intellectual  "machine-shop"  with  which  we  find  fault  as  it 
is  the  fact  that  Kant  has  left  out  of  his  analysis  of  cognition 
two  thirds  of  the  complete  whole. 

With  Kant's  main  conclusion,  that  no  analysis  of  knowl- 
edge is  complete  which  does  not  recognize  the  universal, 
the  necessary,  and  the  eternal  as  seated  within  it,  and  that 
no  reason  for  all  this  can  be  given  which  fails  to  reckon 
with  the  unchanging  constitution  of  the  mind,  we  also  find 
ourselves  in  substantial  agreement,  Certainly,  many  of  the 
details  of  his  doctrine  of  the  a  priori  nature  of  cognition  can- 
not be  maintained.  Moreover,  his  entire  conception  of  this 
element,  at  least  as  he  sometimes  presents  it,  may  fitly 
enough  be  criticised.  But,  however  particular  and  concrete 
our  experience  of  this  or  that  act  of  knowing  may  be  made, 
and  however  contingent  and  fleeting  the  mental  phenom- 
enon called  knowledge  (the  "  relativity  "  of  knowledge)  may 
appear,  every  "  plain  man's "  consciousness  envelops  and 
cherishes  the  seeds  of  that  which  is  absolute  and  unchang- 
ing. That  this  is  so,  a  thorough  analysis  of  all  which  is 
involved  in  the  most  primary  cognitions  indubitably  reveals ; 
and  how  it  can  be  so,  can  only  be  explained  if,  sooner  or 
later  in  the  course  of  our  analysis,  we  invoke  with  Kant 
the  hypothesis  of  constitutional  forms  of  functioning  for 
that  living  and  developing  existence  we  call  the  Self,  or 


80  HISTORY  OF  OPINION 

Mind.  As  the  author  of  the  "  Critique  of  Pure  Reason  " 
himself  repeatedly  states  his  conclusion,  the  accredited 
objective  reality  of  the  world  of  finite  physical  phenomena 
can  be  maintained  only  in  connection  with  the  equally 
accredited  transcendental  ideality  of  the  same  world.  It  is 
the  work  of  mind  which  makes  the  world  to  appear  as  a 
system  of  legally  related  beings.  The  subjective  gives  laws 
to  the  objective.  The  forms  of  cognizing  faculty  set  terms 
to  our  cognition  of  things. 

But  from  this  positive  and  relatively  indisputable  conclu- 
sion of  a  critical  study  of  knowledge  Kant  leaps  at  once, 
and  often  without  a  show  even  of  laying  the  stepping-stones 
of  an  argument,  to  a  wholly  negative  and  agnostic  position. 
Space  and  time  are,  without  further  critical  examination, 
declared  to  be  "  mere  form  of  our  intuition  "  (blosse  Form 
eurer  Anschauung) ;  "  they  can  never  tell  us  the  least  thing  " 
about  that  eatfra-mental  reality  which,  however,  —  as  Kant 
himself  asserts,  either  naively  or  perforce,  driven  by  the  uni- 
versal conviction,  —  lies  at  the  foundation  of,  and  is  the 
ultimate  explaining  cause  of  the  phenomena.1  Now  it  is 
plain  that  unless  time  has  some  kind  of  transcendental 
reality,  change  cannot  be  a  characteristic  of  the  real  world ; 
and  if  we  are  not  able  to  affirm  or  to  postulate  the  reality  of 
change,  knowledge  itself  —  both  as  respects  its  subjective 
content  and  its  trans-subjective  reference  —  becomes  impos- 
sible. One  way  of  recovery,  however,  consists  in  showing 
that  throughout  Kant's  discussion  of  both  space  and  time, 
the  question  as  to  the  psychological  origin  and  nature  of 
human  mental  representations  corresponding  to  these  words, 
and  the  question  as  to  the  possibility  and  the  nature  of  the 
ontological  correlates  of  these  forms  of  mental  representa- 
tions, are  constantly  confused.  In  this  confusion  the  true 
epistemological  problem,  as  to  the  nature,  extent,  and  proof 

1  See  the  "  General  Remarks  on  the  Transcendental  ^Esthetic  "  in  the  second 
edition. 


HISTORY  OF  OPINION  81 

of  the  truth  of  our  mental  representations  is  almost  wholly 
lost  out  of  sight. 

So,  too,  it  is  declared  by  Kant  concerning  all  the  consti- 
tutional forms  of  the  functioning  of  intellect  in  the  knowl- 
edge of  things,  that  they  are  mere  forms  of  our  minding,  and 
can  never  tell  us  anything  about  the  transcendental  reality 
of  things.  The  categories,  indeed,  seem  "  to  be  capable  of 
an  application  beyond  the  sphere  of  sensuous  objects.  But 
this  is  not  the  case.  They  are  nothing  but  mere  forms  of 
thought."1  Matter  itself  is  substantia  phenomenon.  It  is 
never  known  as  anything  but  the  intellectualized  "phe- 
nomena of  the  external  sense."  And  as  to  "the  transcen- 
dental object,  which  is  the  ground  of  this  phenomenon  that 
we  call  matter,"  it  is  a  "mere  somewhat "  (ein  blosses  JStwas, 
a  nescio  quid)  of  which  "  we  should  not  at  all  understand 
what  it  is,  even  if  some  one  could  tell  us. "  2  Such  nescience, 
dogmatically  asserted  and  boldly  declared  forever  irremov- 
able, is  the  negative  conclusion  of  the  Kantian  critique  of 
knowledge;  and  that,  as  to  the  assumed  entities  which  lie 
within  the  comparatively  narrow  limits  of  what  is  admitted 
to  belong  to  the  sphere  of  knowledge.  But  when  the  case 
comes  forward  for  adjudication  upon  the  merits  of  the 
claims  put  forth  to  know  the  Self,  and  God,  or  any  invis- 
ible non-sensuous  realities,  it  goes  much  harder  against 
the  plaintiff.  For  in  all  this  realm,  according  to  Kant, 
intellect  is  lured  on  by  an  irresistible  dialectic  of  self-deceit 
(eine  Logik  des  Scheins).  And  by  this  he  will  not  allow  us 
to  suppose  that  there  is  meant  such  an  estimate  of  probabili- 
ties, or  balancing  of  postulates,  as  often  we  must  accept  in 
the  "room"  of  surer  cognition,  and  must  make  use  of  as 
man's  best  substitute  for  demonstrated  truth.  But  he  would 
have  us  understand  that  all  our  choicest  structures  of  rea- 

1  On  the  "  Ground  of  the  Division  of  all  Objects  into   Phenomena   and 
Noumena." 

2  "  Of  the  Amphiboly  of  the  Concepts  of  Reflection." 

6 


82  HISTORY  OF  OPINION 

soning  on  such  subjects  are  full  of  the  dry  rot  of  innumer- 
able paralogisms  and  antinomies.  Therefore  they  vanish  in 
dust  and  ashes  of  this  same  illusory  dialectic,  as  often  as 
the  finger  of  critical  inquiry  touches  them. 

As  to  the  truth  of  the  charge  that  human  reason  is  involved 
in  hopeless  "paralogisms"  and  "antinomies,"  we  shall 
inquire  more  particularly  in  a  later  chapter.  And  the 
inquiry  will  show  that  most,  if  not  all,  of  these  alleged 
paralogisms  and  antinomies  exist  in  rational  consciousness 
only  as  they  are  put  there  by  the  critic  of  reason  himself. 
Such  of  them,  however,  as  cannot  be  quite  so  summarily 
dealt  with  will  be  seen  to  be  premises,  or  starting-points, 
or  incitements,  to  the  outreach  after  those  higher  truths 
in  the  full  apprehension  of  which  the  very  appearance  of 
paralogism  or  antinomy  passes  away.  But  what  we  wish 
now  to  cry  out  against  involves  two  quite  unwarrantable 
assumptions  in  the  critical  philosophy  of  Kant.  The  first 
of  these  is  his  proposal  to  limit  the  extent  and  the  claims  of 
experience,  with  its  ripening  into  full  fruitage  of  assured 
knowledge,  to  the  domain  of  sensuous  cognition.  Episte- 
mological  criticism  itself  shows  that  neither  scepticism  nor 
agnosticism  can  maintain  any  right  to  dig  a  ditch  between 
the  domains  of  the  things  of  sense  and  the  things  of  the 
spirit.  Or,  at  any  rate,  if  scepticism  digs  such  a  ditch,  and 
agnosticism  consigns  to  it  the  alleged  entities  of  the  soul 
and  of  God,  it  is  quite  impossible  to  keep  the  choicest  curios 
and  even  the  most  substantial  furniture  of  the  physical 
sciences  from  being  flung  unceremoniously  into  the  same 
ditch.  The  things  of  science  need  salvation  both  by  faith 
and  by  works  quite  as  much  as  does  the  soul  of  man  or  the 
soul  of  the  World-All. 

But,  second,  we  object  to  the  off-hand  assumption  that  — 
to  employ  the  Kantian  terminology  —  the  transcendental 
ideality  of  things  is  identical  with  the  transcendental  non- 
reality  of  things.  A  protest  to  this  crucial  estimate  of  the 


HISTORY  OF  OPINION  83 

use  made  of  the  critical  method  by  the  author  of  reason's 
Critique  has  already  been  entered.  But  the  protest  needs 
at  this  point  some  further  explanation  and  enforcement. 
Let  it  be  granted  that  all  cognition  is,  as  described  by 
psychology  and  handed  over  to  the  philosophy  of  knowledge 
for  its  profounder  analysis,  a  subjective  or  ideal  affair.  Let 
it  also  be  granted  that  all  cognition,  regarded  as  giving  us 
a  world  of  objects  which  are  set  in  fixed  and  legal  relations 
to  each  other,  can  only  be  accounted  for  by  referring  it  to 
fixed  laws,  or  constitutional  modes  of  the  functioning,  of 
the  cognizing  subject,  —  the  human  Self  or  Mind.  Let  it 
also  be  granted  that  no  means  can  ever  be  discovered,  not 
only  of  knowing  but  even  of  imagining  in  the  most  shadowy 
way,  what  are  the  nature  and  modes  of  behavior  of  so-called 
"  things-in-themselves, "  —  meaning  by  this  realities  regarded 
as  out  of  all  relation  to  the  cognitive  human  mind.  Still 
the  assumption  which  Kant  impliedly  finds  fault  with 
Aristotle  and  with  all  his  own  predecessors  for  making  — 
namely,  that  the  fundamental  forms  of  cognition  also  some- 
how correspond  to  the  forms  of  the  being  of  things  given  in 
cognition  —  cannot  be  curtly  dismissed.  At  any  rate  the 
denial  that  this  correspondence  is  actual,  or  that  it  may  be 
actual,  cannot  be  dogmatically  made  by  the  critical  investi- 
gator of  cognitive  faculty,  who  remains  faithful  to  his  task 
of  analyzing  and  explaining  the  entire  structure  of  human 
knowledge.  In  fact,  we  shall  show  that  some  such  assump- 
tion is  of  the  very  essence  of  cognition  itself. 

To  put  the  same  protest  in  yet  more  familiar  terms,  let  us 
suppose  that  I  am  told:  "All  this  fair  and  orderly  world 
of  so-called  material  things  is  but  phenomenon  of  your 
consciousness.  Sun,  moon,  and  star,  as  well  as  the  clod 
beneath  the  foot  and  the  rose  on  the  bush,  and  even  the  child 
or  the  wife  by  your  side,  is,  and  ever  must  be,  for  you,  this 
only  —  your  idea."  What  response  is  possible  but  this  ?  — 
"Yes,  truly,  no  object  of  knowledge  exists  for  me,  except 


84  HISTORY  OF  OPINION 

as  I  know  it  to  exist ;  and  for  me,  there  is  nothing  known, 
without  my  cognitive  activity."  But  suppose  I  am  further 
assured  that  the  case  is  worse  than  this.  All  the  perma- 
nent and  necessary  forms  of  the  things  you  know  —  what 
they  appear  to  you  to  be  and  to  do  —  depend  upon  the  char- 
acter of  the  tissue,  as  it  were,  upon  the  warp  and  woof,  of 
your  cognitive  faculty.  This  knowing  of  yours  is  your 
knowing ;  it  is  your  finite,  relative,  and  merely  human  way 
of  sensing,  imagining,  and  thinking  things.  Yes,  still 
truly,  although,  perhaps,  not  quite  so  obviously.  For  I 
know  no  way  of  knowing  but  that  which  I  suppose  I  share 
in  common  with  my  fellow-men.  I  also  suppose,  if  I  should 
ever  come  into  possession  of  quite  other  and  now  wholly  in- 
conceivable ways  of  knowing,  that  these,  too,  would  still  be 
my  ways  of  knowing.  And  if  1  could  not  recognize  them  as 
"my"  ways,  then  this  new  form  of  mentality  would  not  be 
what  I  now  call  "  knowing ; "  nor  could  I  communicate  its 
content  to  other  minds,  or  even  know  of  the  existence  of 
such  minds,  unless  I  then,  as  now,  supposed  that  these  other 
minds  were  of  like  constitution  with  myself. 

At  this  point  we  come  upon  the  fundamental  fallacy  of  the 
Kantian  critical  philosophy  in  its  effort  to  accomplish  the 
end  which  it  deliberately  chose  as  the  highest  of  its  entire 
endeavor.  This  end  is  the  placing  of  the  life  of  conduct 
upon  sure  foundations.  "I  had,  therefore,"  says  Kant,1  "to 
remove  knowledge  in  order  to  make  room  for  faith. "  "  All 
speculative  knowledge  of  reason  is  limited  to  objects  of 
experience  (the  world  of  things  regarded  as  merely  phe- 
nomena) ;  but  it  should  be  carefully  borne  in  mind  that  this 
leaves  it  perfectly  open  to  us  to  think  the  same  objects  as 
things  by  themselves,  though  we  cannot  know  them. "  Thus, 
in  the  "Critique  of  Practical  Reason,"  the  transcendental 
realities,  and  the  actuality  of  our  non-sensuous  relations  to 
them,  are  brought  back  to  our  possession,  but  only  as  postu- 

1  Preface  to  the  second  edition  of  the  Critique  of  Pure  Reason. 


HISTORY  OF  OPINION  85 

lates  needed  for  the  life  of  conduct.  We  may  act  —  nay,  we 
are  bound  to  act  —  as  though  a  world  of  ethical  personalities 
constituted  like  ourselves  were  in  existence,  and  as  though 
our  thoughts  about  God,  freedom,  and  immortality  were 
true ;  we  must  not,  however,  affirm  that  such  realities  are  in 
any  way,  or  degree,  given  to  us  as  objects  of  knowledge. 

Now  the  inadequate  and  false  psychology  which  teaches 
the  doctrine  of  a  "thought"  justifiable  about  things,  which 
neither  starts  from  nor  leads  to  safer  foundations  of  knowl- 
edge, and  which  separates  cognition  and  belief  as  though 
they  referred  to  totally  different  spheres  of  objects,  will  be 
exposed  in  the  proper  place.  What  is  here  necessary  to 
emphasize  with  regard  to  the  outcome  of  the  Kantian  critical 
philosophy  is  this:  Human  nature  cannot  be  divided  into 
mutilated  halves,  one  of  which  is  valid  for  the  cognition  of 
sensuous  things  regarded  as  mere  phenomena,  and  the  other 
of  which  is  valid  for  the  rational  apprehension  ("thinking 
about,"  "having  faith  in,"  or  seizure  in  anyway  —  call  it 
what  you  will)  of  transcendental  realities.  Human  nature, 
as  cognitive  faculty,  is  one  thing  throughout;  its  functioning, 
in  all  spheres,  is  as  a  living  unity;  its  growth,  in  all  stages 
and  degrees  of  development,  falls  under  the  principle  of 
continuity.  The  man  of  science  is  also  the  man  of  good  or 
bad  moral  character  and  the  man  of  religion  or  irreligion. 
When  knowledge  has  been,  whether  rudely  or  ceremoniously, 
banished  by  the  front  door  of  the  temple  of  reason,  it  cannot 
afterward,  whether  pompously  or  surreptitiously,  be  intro- 
duced again  by  the  back  door  concealed  beneath  covers 
labelled  "faith,"  or  "practical  postulate."  Religion  itself 
is  an  attitude  of  the  whole  man,  —  intellect,  feeling,  will. 
Knowledge  is  also  an  attitude  of  the  whole  man,  — intellect, 
feeling,  will.  Mere  thinking,  or  pure  faith,  is  as  impotent 
in  ethics  or  religion  as  it  is  in  science.  But  there  is  no 
science  that  is  not  of  faith,  and  does  not  include  thinking. 

To  return  to  our  critical  estimate  of  Kant,  one  is  forced 


by  every  interest  of  logical  consistency,  however  strongly 
adverse  other  interests  may  be,  either  to  refuse,  almost  in 
toto,  the  conclusions  of  the  "  Critique  of  Practical  Reason  " 
or  thoroughly  to  revise  the  conclusions  of  the  "  Critique  of 
Pure  Reason. "  Accepting  the  negative  and  agnostic  outcome 
of  the  earlier  treatise  one  cannot  follow  Kant  in  accepting 
the  positive  gift  to  a  rational  faith  that  is  offered  by  the  later 
treatise.  Here  is  the  case  of  a  clear-cut  and  inescapable 
"either-or."  Believe  something  and  know  something,  and 
so  perchance  be  saved  for  this  world  and  for  the  world  to 
come;  or  else  doubt  and  deny  consistently,  and  manfully 
face  your  fate  in  both  worlds. 

The  indubitable  law  which  Kant  finds  implicate  in  moral 
consciousness,  in  the  form  of  a  categorical  imperative,  he 
states  as  follows:1  "Act  so  that  the  maxim  of  the  will  can 
always  at  the  same  time  hold  good  as  a  principle  of  universal 
legislation."  There  is  something  painful  about  the  effort 
which  the  great  critic  of  all  cognitive  faculty  makes  to 
expound  the  "  purity  "  of  this  law,  its  perfect  freedom  from 
all  doubtful  and  empirical  data.  The  argument  by  which 
he  supports  this  favoritism  shown  to  the  practical  reason  (as 
though,  indeed,  it  were  a  separate  faculty  or  store-house  of 
faculties),  and  proves  its  "  primacy  "  "  in  its  union  with  the 
speculative  reason,"  fails  completely.  Unless  the  life  of 
conduct  is  known  to  be  regulated  in  accordance  with  actual 
relations  of  a  self-cognizing  Self  to  a  system  of  cognized 
realities,  —  selves  and  things,  —  it  is  absurd  to  speak  of  it 
as  "practical"  or  as  having  any  "fundamental  law."  But 
if  the  forms  of  our  cognition  are  supposed  to  be  merely  sub- 
jective, and  to  give  objectivity  to  their  own  functioning 
without  implicating  corresponding  forms  in  the  actual  rela- 
tions of  the,  for  us,  extra-mentally  existent,  no  meaning  can 
be  given  to  this  fundamental  law  of  the  practical  reason. 

"The   Kantian  theory  of  knowledge,   then,   of  necessity 

1  Critique  of  Practical  Reason,  Book  I.,  chap,  i.,  §  7. 


HISTORY  OF  OPINION  87 

breaks  down  when  it  virtually  tries  to  vindicate  for  the 
metaphysics  of  ethics  and  the  practical  reason  what  it  had 
denied  as  forever  impossible  in  the  functioning  of  the  pure 
speculative  reason.  We  say  '  virtually,'  for  its  author 
obviously  foresaw  that  both  scepticism  and  dogmatism 
would,  from  their  respective  points  of  view,  attack  his 
transcendental  ethical  system ;  and  he  strove  hard  to  defend 
it  against  the  charge  of  inconsistency.  Kant  will  not  at  first 
call  the  practical  reason  '  pure, '  because  he  wishes  not  to 
assume  a  pure  practical  reason,  in  order  rather  to  show  that 
it  exists.  But  its  existence  being  shown,  he  considers  that 
it  stands  in  no  need  of  a  critique  to  hinder  it  from  trans- 
cending its  limits;  for  it  proves  its  own  reality  and  the 
reality  of  its  conceptions  by  an  argument  of  fact.  We  may 
know  the  fundamental  law  of  the  practical  reason ;  it  bears 
the  form  of  a  command,  —  a  categorical  imperative.  What- 
ever principles  are,  as  necessary  convictions,  attached  to 
this  principle  are  postulates  of  the  pure  practical  reason. 
Hence  we  find  Freedom,  Immortality,  and  God  restored  from 
the  spaces  swept  empty  by  the  critique  of  speculative  reason. 
"  But  Kant's  categorical  imperative  is  itself  only  an  imper- 
fect and  faulty  generalization  from  empirical  data  of  ethical 
feeling,  judgments,  and  conduct.  It  is  not  even  an  exact 
summary  of  the  testimony,  in  reality,  of  human  moral  con- 
sciousness. Were  it  a  true  generalization,  however,  and 
therefore  worthy  to  be  itself  called  a  knowledge,  it  could  be 
shown  to  be  dependent  for  its  validity  upon  many  subordi- 
nate conceptions  and  convictions  which  must  also  have  the 
validity  of  known  truths.  Otherwise,  the  categorical  im- 
perative itself  is  condemned  as  the  vague  and  illusory  dream 
of  the  individual  consciousness.  Metaphysical  postulates, 
other  than  the  three  acknowledged  postulates  of  the  pure 
practical  reason,  with  that  inseparably  adhering  conviction 
which  makes  them  principles  of  all  knowledge  as  well  as 
principles  of  all  thought,  enter  into  the  very  substance  of 


88  HISTORY  OF  OPINION 

this  categorical  imperative.  Beings,  with  powers  called 
'  wills,'  rationally  answering  to  ends  that  involve  other  beings- 
not-themselves  but  like  constituted,  and  who  may  be  expected 
to  act  as  bound  with  their  fellows  in  a  system  of  moral 
order  —  all  this,  and  much  more,  is  involved  in  the  main 
principle  of  the  practical  reason.  But  what  an  infinity  of 
knowledge,  made  knowledge  by  the  suffusion  of  rational 
thinking  with  rational  conviction,  and  in  some  sort  placing 
the  mind  of  the  individual  face  to  face  with  a  wrorld  of 
reality,  is  here !  Some  of  these  are  the  very  things  of  which 
we  have  been  told,  as  the  result  of  the  critical  process 
applied  to  speculative  reason,  that  they  may  not  be  spoken 
of  as  '  known, '  but  may  only  be  permitted  to  thought,  with- 
out hope  of  finding  content  for  the  empty  form,  no  matter 
how  much  we  extend  the  bounds  of  experience.  If  these 
postulated  entities  and  relations  are  not  real,  then  the  cate- 
gorical imperative  and  all  it  implicates  is  but  a  dream  — 
nay,  it  is  only  the  dream  of  a  dream.  Must  we  not  then,  in 
consistency,  either  include  all  —  and  especially  the  categor- 
ical imperative  with  its  accessory  postulates  —  under  the 
condemnation  uttered  by  consistent  scepticism,  or  else 
retrace  the  steps  passed  over  in  the  criticism  of  speculative 
reason,  and  discover  grounds  for  a  larger  '  knowledge,'  with 
its  eternal  accompaniment  of  rational  faith  ? 

"  The  same  fate  must  await  all  those  theories  of  knowledge 
which  end  in  scepticism  as  the  result  of  critical  processes. 
Nor  is  the  fate  much  better  of  those  theories  which  endeavor 
to  save  from  scepticism  certain  portions  of  human  knowl- 
edge, while  denying  in  general  the  possibility  of  validating 
knowledge  as  such.  The  principle  of  self-consistency  is  of 
the  last  importance  to  reason.  It  is  in  fact  only  one  form 
of  stating  the  undying  self-confidence  of  reason.  The  prac- 
tical exhortation  of  experience  in  noetical  philosophy  is,  then : 
Let  us  by  all  means  maintain  a  rational  consistency."  1 

1  Quoted  from  the  author's  "  Introduction  to  Philosophy,"  pp.  1 86  f . 


HISTORY  OF  OPINION  89 

It  would  seem  as  though  one  lesson  in  the  philosophy  of 
knowledge  should  be  thoroughly  learned  for  all  time  from 
the  example  of  Kant.  Between  the  outfit  of  man  for  a  scien- 
tific knowledge  of  the  world  of  sensuous  facts  and  of  their 
connections,  on  the  one  hand,  and  his  outfit  for  the  life  of 
conduct  and  religious  belief  on  the  other  hand,  no  great  gulf 
can  be  fixed  in  the  name  of  a  consistent  epistemology.  We 
cannot "  make  room  for  faith  "  by  "  removing  knowledge  " ;  we 
cannot  posit  knowledge  in  spheres  where  faith  has  no  province. 
We  cannot  virtually  discredit  the  cognitive  faculty  of  man 
throughout,  and  then  save  to  knowledge,  or  to  faith,  or  to 
practical  postulates,  some  specially  favored  kind  of  cogni- 
tion. Neither  can  we  undermine  the  foundations  of  the  plain 
man's  consciousness  and  trust  the  superstructure  of  philoso- 
phy's more  ponderous  and  towering  speculative  thought.1 

In  closing  this  historical  sketch  we  only  mention  three 
attempts  subsequent  to  Kant  that  supply  elements  to  the 
philosophical  account  of  knowledge  which  his  criticism  had 
either  neglected  or  relatively  depressed.  Fichte  emphasizes 
feeling  —  especially  moral  feeling;  Hegel  emphasizes  the 
dialectical  process,  or  thinking;  Schopenhauer  emphasizes 
the  intuitive  attitude  of  will.  But  neither  of  these  at  all 
approaches  Kant,  either  in  the  critical  spirit  or  in  the 
patient,  detailed  investigation  which  the  latter  brought  to 
bear  upon  the  problem  of  knowledge. 

Fichte  based  the  validity  as  well  as  the  constitution  of 
knowledge  upon  feeling,  as  yearning  and  as  certitude.  The 
criterion  of  cognition  he  makes,  not  insight,  as  Reinhold 
had  done,  but  rather  an  intellectual  feeling  of  certainty 
which  cannot  be  explained.  This  emotional  attitude  is  in- 
separable from  every  content  of  thought,  and  from  all  activity 

i  In  Mansel's  "  Limits  of  Religious  Thought "  we  have  an  example  of  the 
futility  of  trying  to  secure  to  faith  what  has  been  made  impossible  or  absurd  to 
knowledge.  In  Bradley's  "  Appearance  and  Reality "  we  have  an  example  of 
the  futility  of  trying  to  secure  by  speculative  thinking  what  has  been  made  both 
impossible  to  faith  and  absurd  to  knowledge. 


90  HISTORY  OF  OPINION 

of  thinking.  It  is,  however,  only  immediate  and  probable, 
not  demonstrable;  it  is  to  be  assumed  as  necessarily  be- 
longing to  every  Ego.  But  the  highest  form  of  cognition 
is  that  which  arises  out  of  the  ethical  feeling  of  responsibil- 
ity, which  issues  out  of  a  recognized  fiat,  "Thou  shalt."1 

Hegel  takes  many  important  exceptions  to  the  conclusions 
of  Kant  respecting  the  possibility,  the  criteria,  and  the 
limits  of  knowledge.  To  the  latter's  agnostic  outcome  he 
opposes  the  claim  by  logic  (now  no  longer  a  "logic  of  illu- 
sion ")  to  unfold  the  very  nature  of  Absolute  Being,  read- 
ing in  the  inner  movement  of  reason's  dialectic,  as  Kepler 
did  in"  the  movements  of  the  planets,  the  very  thoughts  of 
God,  after  Him.  "Thoughts,  according  to  Kant,"  says  he, 
"although  universal  and  necessary  categories,  are  only  our 
thoughts,  —  separated  by  an  impassable  gulf  from  the  thing, 
as  it  exists  apart  from  our  knowledge.  But  a  truly  objec- 
tive thought,  far  from  being  merely  ours,  must  at  the  same 
time  be  what  we  have  to  discover  in  things,  and  in  every 
object  of  perception."  These  two  elements,  Being  and 
Thought,  which  Kant  had  separated,  after  "  denuding  them  " 
of  what  they  have  in  their  united  existence,  Hegel  would 
bring  together  again.  The  conceptions  which  are  analyzed 
out  of  the  process  of  thinking  are  the  categories  of  reality; 
they  must  be  understood  as  "moments"  in  a  living  develop- 
ment. Our  knowledge  is  not  merely  of  the  phenomenon. 
The  rather  "is  the  phenomenon  the  arising  and  passing- 
away  of  that  which  itself  does  not  arise  and  pass  away,  but 
is  in  itself,  and  constitutes  the  reality  and  the  movement  of 
the  life  of  truth. " 

But  this  notable  and  praiseworthy  attempt  to  overcome 
the  agnostic  outcome  of  the  Kantian  critique,  which  Hegel 
elaborated,  itself  issues  in  positions  that  are  theoretically 
one-sided  and  practically  faulty.  Our  entire  epistemological 
theory  cannot  safely  be  resolved  into  an  assumption  that 

1  See  especially  his  "  Essay  on  the  Grounds  of  Certainty  in  Religion." 


HISTORY  OF  OPINION  91 

when  we  have  discovered  the  categories,  and  arranged  them 
systematically  so  as  to  construct  a  circle  or  globus  of  such 
pure  concepts,  we  have  justified  our  faculty  of  cognition 
against  all  the  assaults  of  scepticism  and  agnosticism,  or 
have  even  succeeded  in  understanding  it.  Moreover,  the 
ontological  postulate,  or  view  of  reality  which  conceives  of 
Spirit  as  possibly  having  being-in-itself  that  is  not  also 
being-for-itself,  is  full  of  internal  contradictions.  Nor  are 
the  Hegelian  antinomies  much  less  dangerous  to  the  validity 
for  reality  of  our  thoughts  than  are  the  antinomies  of  Kant. 
Indeed,  they  may  be  understood  so  as  to  prove  more  danger- 
ous. For  Kant's  antinomies,  if  admitted,  only  affect  a 
limit  to  human  efforts  in  applying  our  sensuous  imagination 
to  subjects  with  which  it  cannot  rightly  claim  the  ability  to 
deal.  But  the  antinomies  of  the  Hegelian  dialectic,  con- 
ceived of  as  an  essentially  true  representation  of  the  nature 
of  all  reality,  have  their  seat  in  more  vital  parts  of  the 
organism  of  knowledge.  And,  practically,  the  history  of 
human  experience  has  since  shown  that  Hegel's  philosophy 
extols  theory  too  much,  and  makes  it  a  substitute  for 
insight,  for  instinct  and  feeling,  for  morality  as  conduct, 
and  for  religion  as  life. 

There  are  few  passages  in  any  of  our  modern  books  on 
philosophy  which,  when  read  in  the  light  of  the  day  of  their 
writing,  seem  more  timely  and  suggestive  than  the  latter 
two  thirds  of  the  first  Book  of  Schopenhauer's  "  World  as 
Will  and  Idea."  In  these  pages  the  author,  with  much  ill- 
concealed  scorn  of  Fichte  and  Hegel,  and  with  considerable 
invective  against  their  views,  propounds  his  own  theory  of 
knowledge.  His  earlier  work  on  the  "Four-fold  Root  of  the 
Principle  of  Sufficient  Reason "  presents  some  of  the  most 
technical  parts  of  his  theory  in  a  more  systematic  form. 
His  "  Criticism  of  the  Kantian  Philosophy "  develops  his 
views  further,  though  chiefly  in  a  polemical  and  negative 
way.  The  positive  merit  of  Schopenhauer's  utterances  con- 


92  HISTORY  OF  OPINION 

sists  in  their  bringing  forward  —  if  we  may  venture  upon  such 
a  term  —  the  "  biological  view  "  of  the  origin,  nature,  and 
criteria  of  human  cognition.  Over  against  knowledge  by 
concepts  —  that  knowledge  which  Hegel  identified  with  the 
very  life  of  reality  —  Schopenhauer  maintains  the  claims  of 
perceptual  knowledge,  of  the  immediate  seizure,  as  a  matter 
of  warm  feeling  and  energetic  volition,  of  the  really  existent 
relations  of  things  and  of  events.  The  Kennen  of  the  artist, 
or  the  discoverer,  or  the  true  saint,  is  surer  knowledge,  he 
thinks,  and  less  fraught  with  erroneous  fragments  of  so-called 
"  reason's  "  manufacture,  than  is  the  Wissen  of  the  man  of 
science.  For  intellect,  impelled  by  the  will  to  live,  and 
guided  by  the  feeling  for  what  is  seemingly  good  to  live  by 
and  upon,  brings  us  more  immediately  and  surely  to  the 
heart  of  reality.  And  intellect,  in  Schopenhauer's  vocabu- 
lary, is  not  a  reasoning  faculty;  it  is  the  unreasoned  envis- 
agement  of  the  presence  and  significance  of  the  principle  of 
sufficient  reason  as  constitutive  of  the  world  of  things. 

We  need  not  delay  to  criticise  the  extremes  to  which 
Schopenhauer  carries  his  view  of  the  superior  value  of  per- 
ceptive as  compared  with  conceptual  knowledge.  It  is 
enough  at  present  to  say  that  the  marked  separation  which 
he  makes  between  perception  and  conception  is  psychologi- 
cally false.  Knowledge  is  not,  indeed,  mere  thinking;  but, 
then,  there  is  no  knowledge  to  be  had  without,  at  least,  the 
primary  activities  of  thinking  faculty.  And  there  is  surely 
no  structure  of  knowledge,  no  growth  and  systematization  of 
cognitions  which  we  can  take,  even  on  faith,  as  representa- 
tive of  the  world  of  real  beings  and  real  events,  without 
elaborate  activity  of  thought. 

We  turn  now  to  face  for  ourselves  the  different,  though 
not  distinct  problems  which  enter  into  the  one  great  problem 
of  knowledge.  This  brief  survey  of  the  history  of  opinion, 
if  it  does  not  start  us  on  our  way  with  handfuls  of  coin 
which  will  pass  current  in  the  markets  of  the  present  world 


HISTORY  OF  OPINION  93 

of  thought,  may  serve  to  warn  us  in  what  direction  our 
journey  lies,  through  what  thickets  and  swamps  we  must  find 
a  path,  and  over  what  mountains  we  must  pass ;  as  well  as 
—  surely  a  no  less  important  lesson  —  what  short  cuts  we 
must  avoid  taking  with  the  vain  hope  thus  more  easily  to 
reach  the  desired  end.  But  when  we  have  reached  this  end, 
and  look  back  to  find  the  views  we  have  taken  by  the  way, 
all  confirmed  by  the  more  profound  insights  and  permanent 
impressions  of  those  who  have  travelled  before  us,  we  shall 
the  more  confidently  believe  that  the  truth  of  cognition  has 
been  found  as  it  is  justified  in  the  truth  of  things. 


CHAPTER  IV 

THE  PSYCHOLOGICAL  VIEW 

'"PHE  necessity  for  steadfastly  maintaining  the  proper  psy- 
-•-  chological  Doint  of  view  in  all  reflective  consideration 
of  the  philosophical  problem  of  knowledge  has  already  been 
sufficiently  emphasized.  A  sketch  of  the  history  of  opinion 
has  shown  how  light  broke  in  (for  example,  through  Augus- 
tine, Descartes,  Hume)  upon  this  problem  whenever  an 
improved  acquaintance  with  the  nature  of  concrete  mental 
phenomena  was  gained.  It  has  also  shown  how,  even  in  the 
case  of  the  greatest  of  all  critics  of  the  human  faculty  of 
cognition,  a  certain  despite  of  "mental  physiology,"  or  of 
the  natural  history  of  psychical  life,  and  an  excessive 
credulity  toward  the  accepted  forms  of  logic,  was  productive 
of  important  errors.  Indeed,  throughout  the  historical 
development  of  epistemological  philosophy,  defective  and 
one-sided  views  of  the  psychology  of  cognition  have  been 
the  chief  sources  of  the  fatal  extremes  of  dogmatism  and  of 
agnosticism.  We  propose,  then,  to  begin  our  discussion  of 
the  epistemological  problem  by  taking  the  psychological 
point  of  view. 

What  has  psychology,  as  the  descriptive  and  explanatory 
science  of  mental  phenomena,  to  tell  about  the  origin,  the 
nature,  and  the  growth  of  human  cognitive  faculty  ?  Whence 
comes  knowledge  ?  What  is  knowledge  ?  and  What  is  the 
course  of  its  development  ?  These  are  the  inquiries  for  which 
an  answer  is  now  sought  from  experience ;  and  for  the  kind  of 
answer  now  sought,  there  is  no  proper  recourse  but  to  the 


THE  PSYCHOLOGICAL  VIEW  95 

concrete,  plain,  work-a-day  facts  of  human  consciousness. 
It  is  not  what  the  master  of  the  subtleties  of  scholastic 
logic,  or  the  student  of  psycho-physics  by  laboratory  methods, 
or  the  philosophizer  already  committed  to  some  metaphysical 
dogma  thinks  about  knowledge,  —  which  we  now  wish  to 
know.  It  is  rather  just  what  every  one  actually  experiences 
who  affirms,  "I know;"  and  just  what  they  experience  most 
fully  who  have  made  most  advancement  in  genuine  knowl- 
edge. But,  of  course,  it  turns  out  here,  as  everywhere  when 
search  is  made  for  the  truth  of  things,  that  the  content  of 
life  is  much  richer,  and  its  complexity  of  method  and  of 
products  much  greater  than  human  science  is  easily  able  to 
depict  or  to  comprehend.  The  plain  man's  work-a-day  con- 
sciousness perpetually  achieves  the  end  of  cognition ;  but  it  is 
too  deep  for  the  logician,  the  psychologist,  or  the  philosopher 
of  any  school  to  fathom.  And  the  danger  of  error  from  fail- 
ure to  include  important  elements  in  one's  catalogue  of  the 
"/acta,"  or  "momenta,"  implicate  in  every  "I  know"  is 
far  greater  than  the  risk  of  putting  more  into  this  catalogue 
than  life  has  itself  put  there.  Indeed,  the  descriptive  and 
explanatory  history  of  cognition  comprises  no  less  than  the 
whole  of  psychology. 

As  to  the  Origin  of  Knowledge  it  is  possible  to  speak 
clearly  only  after  the  meaning  given  to  the  term  has  been 
strictly  defined.  That  psychological  fact  which  induces  the 
search  after  its  own  begetting  and  birthright  becomes  an 
actual  matter  of  experience  only  when  the  records  of  the 
exact  history  of  its  sources  have  been  lost  beyond  the  possi- 
bility of  complete  recovery.  Men  find  themselves  already 
well  advanced  in  the  growth  of  cognitive  faculty  before  they 
begin  to  ask  whence  this  faculty  with  its  resulting  products 
has  arrived.  And  after  a  critical  inquiry  into  origins  is 
undertaken,  both  the  inquiry  and  the  summing  up  of  its  re- 
sults in  recorded  experience  must  take  shape  either  as  knowl- 
edge or  as  the  pretence  of  knowledge.  Unless  I  already  know, 


96  THE  PSYCHOLOGICAL  VIEW 

with  faculties  developed  far  beyond  the  point  when  the  first 
datum  fit  to  be  called  "  knowledge  "  arose  in  consciousness,  I 
cannot  intelligently  raise  the  question,  Whence  comes  knowl- 
edge to  me  and  to  other  men  ?  If  examination  is  made  of 
the  inferior  cognitive  faculty  of  the  lower  animals,  or  of  the 
earlier  forth-puttings,  the  budding  cognitions  of  the  human 
infant's  mind,  the  examination  and  its  conclusions  can 
assume  only  those  points  of  view  which  belong  to  an  adept  in 
the  use  of  cognitive  faculty.  Now,  while  this  fact  does  not 
by  any  means  debar  us  from  forming  justifiable  impressions 
as  to  the  manner  in  which  we  ourselves,  and  all  other  men, 
begin  the  life  of  cognition,  it  does  limit  the  nature  and 
restrict  the  proof  which  is  accessible  to  us  by  immediate 
observation  of  all  the  actual  processes  of  cognition. 

There  is  one  meaning  to  the  word  "origin"  which  is  cer- 
tainly unwarrantable  and  useless  in  the  effort  to  throw  light 
upon  the  epistemological  problem.  Yet,  alas,  this  meaning 
has  been  in  the  past  most  frequently,  and  is  now  in  certain 
quarters  most  persistently,  employed.  The  fallacy  involved 
in  the  figures  of  speech  which  are  commonly  employed  by 
those  who  undertake  the  research  into  the  origins  of  things 
physical  condemns,  for  their  utter  inadequacy,  all  the  so- 
called  "sensational  "  theories  of  knowledge.  These  theories 
find  their  explanation  of  the  beginning  of  knowledge  in  the 
assembling  somehow  of  sensations  and  of  the  revived  images 
of  past  sensations,  called  ideas,  under  the  well-known  laws 
of  association.  It  is  assumed  by  them  all  that  when  mental 
states,  or  forms  of  the  functioning  of  mind  —  even  including 
those  elaborations  called  cognitions  —  are  described  "  content- 
wise,"  they  are  adequately  described.  It  is  also  assumed 
that  the  particular  content  called  a  "  sensation, "  either  in  its 
original  or  transformed  character  as  an  "idea,"  exhausts  the 
entire  catalogue  of  mental  contents  —  the  whole  life  of  mind, 
even  when  described  "  content-wise. "  Now  the  peculiar  fal- 
lacy of  which  all  sensational  theories  are  guilty  in  this  con- 


THE  PSYCHOLOGICAL  VIEW  97 

nection  is  shared  by  them  with  the  greater  part  of  the 
modern  science  of  origins,  as  this  science  is  taught  by 
the  current  biology.  This  is  the  fallacy  of  so  working  the 
principle  of  continuity  as  to  do  away  with  essential  differ- 
ences by  substituting  for  their  honest  and  frank  recognition 
and  explanation  a  connection  between  them,  often  conjec- 
tural, under  the  forms  of  time  or  of  causal  influence.  A 
similar  fallacy  afflicts  sorely  all  the  psychological  sciences, 
—  the  sciences  of  man  both  as  an  individual  and  in  all  the 
various  forms  of  his  relations  and  development  as  a  race. 
It  is  the  very  bone  and  flesh  of  the  hypothesis  customarily 
applied  to  these  sciences. 

In  biology  one  at  least  knows  what  real  transactions  are 
referred  to,  if  one  hears  of  the  "  origin  "  of  the  individual 
animal  from  an  impregnated  egg,  or  of  the  "origin"  of  the 
fully  developed  plant  from  a  germ  or  seed.  In  the  case  of 
the  animal  an  actually  existent  cell  from  the  male  parent 
has  fused  with  a  cell  from  the  female ;  and  out  of  the  product 
of  this  fusion  —  though  in  most  marvellous  and  mysterious 
fashion  —  has  followed  a  growth  which  results  in  the  full 
complement  of  organs  possessed  by  the  adult  animal,  as 
united  anew  in  the  offspring.  In  the  case  of  the  plant  the 
process  is  markedly  similar.  So,  too,  one  knows  what  is 
meant  when  the  chemist  affirms  that  water  has  its  origin 
in  the  union  of  oxygen  and  hydrogen  gases ;  or,  conversely, 
that  these  gases  may  have  their  origin  in  the  chemical 
analysis  of  water.  But  only  a  most  shallow  student  of 
biological  science  considers  that  a  complete  account  has 
been  given  of  the  origin  of  the  adult  by  describing  the  physi- 
cal and  chemical  properties  of  the  egg.  For,  besides  such 
more  obvious  factors  in  the  scientific  account  of  the  genesis 
and  development  of  animal  organisms,  there  are  many  others 
which  must  come  into  the  complete  account.  These  may  be 
roughly  divided  into  two  classes:  such  as  take  the  individual 
animal  out  into  what  is  known  of  the  beings,  forces,  and 

7 


98  THE  PSYCHOLOGICAL  VIEW 

laws  of  the  "  cosmos  "  at  large ;  and  such  as  end  in  the  unex- 
plained mystery  of  the  "nature"  of  the  individual  animal. 
In  the  case  of  the  drop  of  water,  too,  there  is  something 
vastly  more  in  the  compound  than  can  be  accounted  for  hy 
rehearsing  the  marriage  service  over  oxygen  and  hydrogen 
gases  as  a  merely  numerical  formula  of  1000  to  2002. 

But  the  case  of  the  student  of  psychological  origins  is  nota- 
bly different  from  that  of  the  student  of  biology  or  of  chem- 
istry. For  the  psychologist  there  exist  no  real  factors,  or 
actual  antecedents,  which  he  may  observe  in  their  isolation, 
or  understand  previous  to  their  combination  or  while  they 
are  in  actual  process  of  combining.  Strictly  speaking,  there 
are  no  sensations,  simple  or  complex,  and  either  actually 
existent  or  representatively  existent  in  the  imagination  and 
thought  of  the  observer.  So-called  sensations  are  themselves 
the  product  of  the  analytical  activity  of  self-cognition,  —  quite 
impotent,  therefore,  to  establish  any  claim  to  be  or  to  act  of 
themselves,  as  though  separable  from  the  cognitive  process  it- 
self. To  speak  of  the  origin  of  knowledge  from  a  combination 
of  sensations  is,  then,  to  deceive  one's  self  with  a  misapplied 
figure  of  speech.  Sensations  are  not  entities,  even  of  the 
psychological  order;  and  if  they  were  entities,  they  are  not 
the  kind  of  entities  to  offer,  by  any  combination,  in  however 
large  quantities  and  high  degrees  of  value,  an  adequate  ex- 
planation for  the  origin  of  knowledge. 

What  has  just  been  said  of  sensational  theories  of  knowl- 
edge is  also  true  of  all  strictly  ideational  theories.  The 
psychological  doctrine  of  Herbart,  especially  as  it  came  to 
its  ripest  fruitage  in  the  later  work  of  his  distinguished  pupil, 
Volkmann  von  Volkmar,  has  been  of  great  value  to  modern 
psychological  science.  Its  value  has  been  increased  rather 
than  diminished  by  its  frank  avowal  of  the  need  of  metaphys- 
ical standpoints  and  by  its  tenacious  defence  of  the  propo- 
sition that  mental  phenomena  are  all  to  be  considered  as 
"  forthputtings  "  of  the  unfolding  life  of  mind.  But  in  its 


THE  PSYCHOLOGICAL  VIEW  99 

doctrine  of  judgment,  and  of  feeling,  and  of  will,  —  and  so 
of  all  these  as  constituting  two  thirds  or  three  fourths  of 
cognition,  —  its  weakness  is  most  manifest.  Cognition  can- 
not, either  for  its  origin,  or  for  its  nature,  or  for  its  growth, 
be  considered  as  completely  explained  by  any  theory  of  ideas. 
It  is  true  that  the  later  developments  of  the  Herbartian 
doctrine,  especially  as  set  forth  by  Volkmann,  include  under 
the  term  "  idea  "  various  complex  forms  of  mental  functioning ; 
true  also  that  they  emphasize,  in  a  commendable  way,  the 
active  rather  than  the  passive  aspect  of  ideation-processes 
(Vorstellen  rather  than  Vorstellung  or  Das  Vorgestellfy. 
They  thus  succeed  both  in  getting  a  richer  content  into  their 
description  of  mental  phenomena,  and  in  regarding  these 
phenomena  "  function-wise  "  as  well  as  "  content- wise  "  much 
more  faithfully  than  do  the  advocates  of  the  sensational 
school.  But  we  must  not  be  deceived  by  increased  subtlety 
of  analysis  and  more  generous  use  of  terminology.  As  will 
be  made  clear  by  the  detailed  and  critical  examination  of  the 
nature  of  cognition,  every  mental  positing  corresponding  to 
the  words  "I  know"  implies  something  far  more  than  can  be 
explained  by  combination  of  ideation-processes. 

As  to  the  possibility  of  a  purely  biological  or  physiological 
explanation  of  the  origin  of  knowledge,  the  case  is  so  hope- 
less that  it  is  scarcely  worth  while  to  argue  it.  For  those, 
however,  who  incline  to  confuse  such  an  explanatory  theory 
with  another  contention  quite  different,  we  have  presented 
the  subject  in  another  place.1 

Thus  far  negatively.  In  some  sort,  however,  appeal  may 
successfully  be  made  to  modern  psychology  to  render  an 
account  of  the  origin  of  knowledge.  Such  an  appeal  may 
rightfully  expect  an  answer  in  both  of  two  ways.  Psycho- 
logical analysis  can  exhibit  those  manifold  factors  which  may 
be  discerned  by  the  self-cognizing  mind  as  characterizing  its 
activities  on  the  way  to,  or  after  it  is  regarded  as  already  hav- 

1  See  the  author's  "  Philosophy  of  Mind,"  pp.  98  £.,  115  f.,  229  f. 


100  THE  PSYCHOLOGICAL   VIEW 

ing  reached,  the  mental  attitude  called  cognition.  Of  course, 
by  the  term  "  factors,"  in  all  such  connection,  one  must  not 
understand  separable  entities,  or  even  actual  separable  ele- 
ments or  momenta  of  the  complex  mental  state.  But  the 
trained  self-consciousness  of  every  man  enables  him  to  ob- 
serve with  concentrated  attention  now  one  and  now  another  of 
the  so-called  faculties  of  mind,  or  forms  of  psychical  function 
ing,  as  they  are  concerned  in  the  living  unity  of  an  act  of 
knowing.  This  analysis  of  self-consciousness  may  be  made, 
by  exercise  and  study  of  mental  phenomena,  by  growth  in 
depth  and  in  quickness  of  insights,  more  rich  in  its  response 
to  the  call  for  a  true  picture  of  actuality.  The  actuality  of 
cognition  belongs  to  every  human  consciousness  as  an  incon- 
testable fact ;  but  the  analytic  discovery  and  portrayal  of  this 
actuality  is  a  matter  of  combined  science  and  tact,  as  is  every 
other  matter  of  psychic  life.  And  like  all  matters  of  psycho- 
logical science,  this  study  may  be  enriched  by  observation  of 
others  and  by  the  experimental  method. 

Not  only  the  so-called  psychic  factors,  but  also  the  prin- 
ciples according  to  which  these  factors  combine,  may  be 
made  the  subject  of  inquiry.  In  the  actual  process  of  cog- 
nition the  different  forms  of  mental  functioning  (which  are 
the  realities  corresponding  to  the  word  "  factors  ")  rise  and 
fall  in  extensity  and  intensity  ;  they  come  forward  and  take 
the  lead,  so  to  speak,  or  retreat  into  the  background  of  a 
relative  obscurity  and  insignificance.  In  knowing  anything, 
for  example,  I  am  at  one  instant  more  obviously  sensing  it 
through  this,  and  at  another  instant  through  that,  avenue  of 
sense.  In  other  words,  the  particular  "  Thing  "  is  now  to 
me  a  thing  chiefly  of  sight ;  now  of  touch  and  the  muscular 
sense ;  now,  perchance,  of  taste  or  of  hearing.  But  again, 
the  same  thing,  in  the  same  complex  process  of  cognition, 
is  rather  known  by  being  judged  to  belong  to  this  or  that 
class  of  things,  or  by  being  thought  about  as  standing  in 
this  or  that  relation  to  me  and  to  other  things.  And  yet, 


THE  PSYCHOLOGICAL  VIEW  101 

anon,  the  same,  thing  is  more  felt  and  cognized  as  opposed 
to  my  will,  —  a  forceful  thing,  that  will  not  what  /will,  and 
that  reveals  itself  as  a  resistance  to  the  forthputtings  of  my 
embodied  Self.  In  all  this  living  flux  of  my  conscious  life, 
this  stream  of  consciousness  I  call  my  cognizing  Ego,  with 
the  rise  and  fall  of  the  varying  shades  of  sense,  judgment, 
feeling,  and  will,  the  object  there,  the  "  real  Thing,"  becomes 
known  to  me. 

In  the  meaning,  then,  of  giving  a  descriptive  history 
(accompanied  by  certain  meagre  and  tentative  explanatory 
remarks)  of  the  different  factors  discovered  in  what  is  called 
a  cognition,  and  of  the  way  these  factors  behave  with  refer- 
ence to  each  other  and  to  the  Self,  the  origin  of  knowledge 
may  be  said  to  be  explained. 

But  by  the  word  "knowledge"  ("yours"  or  "mine,"  or 
"  his,"  or  that  of  the  race)  men  generally  intend  to  designate 
something  more  than  a  single  process  of  cognition.  It  is, 
indeed,  only  this  single  process,  and  usually  only  a  part  even 
of  any  single  process,  which  can  be  made  the  subject  of  intro- 
spective or  experimental  study.  But  in  some  sort,  the  mental 
doing  and  achieving  which  ends  in  the  judgment  "  I  know  " 
does  take  place  under  the  mind's  immediate  gaze;  it  may 
be  self-consciously  known  to  be  going  on.  Yet  even  if  this 
analysis  were  far  more  certain  and  comprehensive  than  it  is, 
no  one  would  think  of  claiming  that  it  alone  could  result  in  a 
science  of  the  origin  of  knowledge.  The  origin  of  knowledge 
may,  then,  in  a  certain  way  be  understood  by  adding  to  our 
descriptive  history  and  tentative  explanation  of  the  single  pro- 
cesses of  cognition  a  somewhat  similar  history  and  explanation 
of  the  enlargement  of  the  content  of  knowledge  and  the  growth 
of  the  faculty  of  knowing,  in  the  individual  and  in  the  race. 
Here  memory  must  be  summoned  to  the  front ;  for  it  is  de- 
signed to  study  our  own  processes  of  cognition  in  their  rela- 
tions to  each  other,  as  they  have  actually  occurred  in  time. 
But  memory  of  our  own  past  states  will  take  us  only  a  little 


102  THE  PSYCHOLOGICAL  VIEW 

way  here.  Hence  the  value  of  comparative  psychology  for  a 
mastery  of  the  descriptive  history  of  cognition.  On  the  gen- 
eral assumption  (which  is  sufficiently  well  verified)  that  our 
own  earliest  mental  states,  the  forerunners  and  preparers  of 
the  fuller  activities  of  adult  cognition,  corresponded  in  kind 
to  such  of  our  present  mental  states  as  appear  to  have  least 
of  the  more  prominent  cognitive  factors,  we  may  employ  in- 
trospection still  further  in  studying  the  origin  of  knowledge. 
For  example,  I  may  give  an  attentive  study  to  my  own  states 
of  reverie  and  dreaming  (when  I  am  more  exclusively  bound 
under  the  laws  of  the  association  of  ideas),  or  of  absorption  in 
sense  or  in  pleasurable  or  painful  feelings  (when  I  am  eating 
with  a  good  relish,  or  suffering  from  toothache,  or  enjoying 
music),  or  of  abstraction  (when  I  am  more  "  purely  "  thinking.) 

It  appears,  then,  that  the  stages  through  which  the  growth 
of  cognitive  faculty  passes  in  the  life  of  the  individual  and  of 
the  race,  may  be  made  the  subject  of  more  or  less  successful 
investigation ;  and  something  may  also  be  confidently  asserted 
as  to  the  laws  which  control  this  growth.  In  some  sort  all 
this  may  properly  be  called  a  study  of  the  "  origin  of  knowl- 
edge." But  here  again  one  must  not  be  deceived  by  the 
charms  of  any  particular  evolutionary  hypothesis,  whether 
as  applied  to  the  development  of  the  individual  or  of  the 
race,  into  supposing  that  cognition  can  be  wholly  accounted 
for,  as  respects  its  sources,  by  giving  the  detailed  account  of 
that  which  is  not  cognition.  So  often  as  this  is  done,  the 
mystery  of  the  actual  achievement  of  cognitive  faculty  is 
explained  (sic)  by  being  overlooked  or  buried  beneath  a 
heap  of  rubbishy  figures  of  speech. 

The  only  answer,  then,  which  can  be  given  to  the  inquiry 
after  the  psychological  "  origin "  of  knowledge  falls  most 
fitly  under  the  titles,  the  "  nature "  and  the  "  growth "  of 
knowledge.  In  other  words,  when  that  has  been  told  which 
can  be  told  in  response  to  the  questions :  What  is  cognitive 
faculty,  regarded  as  activity  and  as  resultant  ?  and,  What  are 


THE  PSYCHOLOGICAL  VIEW  103 

the  successive  stages  in  which  it  unfolds  itself?  —  nothing 
more  is  to  be  said  about  the  psychological  genesis  of  this 
faculty.  At  no  step  in  these  inquiries  should  it  be  supposed 
that  anything  is  added  to  the  science  of  cognition  by  identi- 
fying in  thought  things  which  are  not  actually  the  same  ;  and 
a  merely  genetic  and  psychological  study  of  the  phenomena 
will  never  suffice  for  the  solution  of  the  episteinological  prob- 
lem upon  this  point. 

Several  most  important  corollaries  follow  from  what  has 
just  been  said ;  and  these  concern  both  the  method  of  psy- 
chological study  which  is  fitted  to  present  the  epistemological 
problem,  and  also  the  character  and  extent  of  that  which  our 
study  can  hope  to  accomplish.  A  certain  prejudice,  not 
altogether  wrong  and  unnatural,  exists  in  these  days  against 
the  refinements  and  subtleties  of  analysis.  But  a  theory  of 
knowledge,  from  its  very  nature,  requires,  chiefly  and  almost 
exclusively,  refinement  and  subtlety  in  analysis.  The  entire 
science  and  philosophy  of  cognition,  the  complete  mastery  of 
the  secrets  of  cognitive  faculty,  is  necessarily  a  matter  of 
thorough  analysis  and  of  sound  discursive  reasoning  upon  a 
basis  of  such  analysis.  Who  will  tell  us  all  that  can  be  told 
about  the  mystery  of  the  conscious  processes  of  every  human 
being  when  he  reaches  the  mental  attitude  expressed  by  the 
words  "  I  know  "  ?  Who  will  furnish  the  theoretical  justifica- 
tion for  that  trust  in  the  human  mind  which  it  belongs  to 
human  nature,  however  often  and  sorely  baffled,  continually 
to  cherish  ?  Who  will  set  the  theoretical  limits  to  scepti- 
cism, and  administer  the  convincing  theoretical  rebuke  to 
agnosticism,  for  the  rational  comfort  of  doubting  and  despair- 
ing souls  ?  Only  he  who  can  most  fully  and  convincingly 
expound  the  length  and  breadth,  the  heighth  and  depth,  of 
man's  power  to  know,  and  the  extent  and  strength  of  the 
grasp  of  this  power  upon  reality.  But  this  end  can  be 
reached  only  by  analysis.  Certain  partially  successful  prac- 
tical refuges  may  indeed  be  offered  for  extreme  scepticism 


104  THE  PSYCHOLOGICAL  VIEW 

and  agnosticism.  But  the  only  refuge  which  can  serve  the 
persistent  inquirer  must  be  found  in  a  better  understanding 
of  what  it  is  to  know,  and  of  all  that  every  act  of  knowledge 
implicates.  The  path  to  this  refuge  is  an  analytical  and  dis- 
cursive exploration  of  cognitive  faculty  itself. 

From  the  same  statement  of  the  facts  in  the  case  we  derive 
a  certain  set  of  limitations  to  our  expectations  concerning 
what  we  may  reasonably  hope.  This  consideration  of  limits 
is  important,  both  in  a  theoretical  and  in  a  practical  way. 
.For  depressing  scepticism  and  despairing  agnosticism  are  most 
often  reactions  from  the  breaking-down  of  unwarrantable 
expectations  or  unreasonable  hopes.  It  cannot  be  too  con- 
stantly borne  in  mind,  then,  that  no  standpoint  outside  of 
reason  itself  is  attainable  for  the  more  secure  criticism  of 
reason.  The  self-limiting  nature  of  sceptical  inquiry  into 
the  validity  of  knowledge,  and  the  self-destructive  nature  of 
the  agnostic  conclusion  to  terminate  this  inquiry,  will  be 
shown  in  due  time.  But  it  is  well  at  the  outset  to  remind 
ourselves  that  we,  as  critics  of  cognitive  faculty,  cannot  claim 
any  point  of  vantage  which  towers  above  the  cognitive  faculty 
itself.  The  philosopher  may,  perchance,  tell  the  plain  man 
more  than  he  can  himself  discover  of  the  content  and  the 
meaning  and  the  implicates  of  the  plain  man's  mind ;  but 
what  the  analyst  sees,  and  even  what  he  imagines  he  sees,  is 
all  contained  within  the  known  or  the  imagined  horizon  of 
their  common  consciousness.  Special  gifts  at  dialectic,  claims 
of  intellectual  intuition,  visions  of  the  Platonic  ideas,  lofty 
or  profound  insights  into  the  mysteries  of  the  transcendental 
realm,  are  all  of  account  here  only  as  they  can  justify  them- 
selves and  their  deliverances  at  the  bar  of  that  reason  in 
which  all  men  have  a  share.  The  critique  of  cognitive  fac- 
ulty neither  has,  nor  can  attain,  a  point  of  view  outside  of 
the  domain  ruled  over  by  that  faculty.  Flights  sunward  are 
limited  by  the  sustaining  power  of  that  very  atmosphere  above 
whose  dust  and  smoke-begrimed  regions  they  rise. 


THE  PSYCHOLOGICAL  VIEW  105 

Again,  no  certification  of  knowledge  is  possible  that  is  not 
somehow  found  actually  existent  within  the  process  of  cogni- 
tion itself.  If  scepticism  is  self-limiting,  and  the  extreme  of 
agnosticism  self-destructive,  it  is  equally  true  that  the  positive 
and  dogmatic  resultant  of  analysis  is  self-limiting  also.  The 
process  of  certifying  stops  somewhere ;  it  cannot,  of  course, 
go  on  forever.  And  where  this  "  process  "  stops  as  a  process, 
what  other  kind  of  certification  can  be  either  expected  or 
actually  found  ?  Plainly,  the  answer  to  this  question  leaves 
us  with  some  total  attitude  of  mind,  or  in  face-to-face  recog- 
nition of  certain  implicates  of  all  cognitive  processes,  which 
do  not  admit  of  any  certification  lying  outside  of  that  which 
they  themselves  possess.  In  other  words,  critical  analysis  of 
the  nature  of  cognition,  with  a  view  to  certify  it,  ends  in  the 
discovery  of  aspects,  or  factors,  or  implicates,  of  every  exer- 
cise of  cognitive  faculty,  which  are  self -certify  ing.  The  in- 
quirer after  certitude  observes  or  infers  his  way  up  to  this 
point,  and  then  finds  certitude  in  reposing  there.  The  de- 
tailed exposition  of  this  truth  is  the  most  important  and 
difficult  part  of  every  philosophical  theory  of  knowledge. 
But  at  the  outset  it  promises  a  saving  of  time  and  strength, 
which  will  otherwise  be  wastefully  and  even  foolishly  em- 
ployed, to  recognize  the  absolutely  inevitable  character  of  this 
truth.  If  by  analysis,  a  fundamental  and  universal  position 
of  certitude  belonging  to  every  act  of  genuine  cognition  is 
discovered,  we  cannot  be  asked  to  certify  this  feeling  of  cer- 
titude by  discovering  another  position  of  a  similar  kind.  If 
by  analysis  we  find  that  judgment  in  cognition  is  of  its  very 
nature,  a  positing  in  reality  of  the  object  of  cognition,  we 
cannot  be  required  to  justify  this  judgment  by  a  process  of 
reasoning  that  could  itself  only  repose  on  judgments  of  like 
character.  Dispute  and  argument  cannot  serve  as  grounds 
for  that  which  is  assumed  in  all  proposal  to  dispute  and  to 
argue,  invariably  and  with  an  absolute  necessity.  They  who 
will  not  be  satisfied  until  they  have  certified,  in  infinitum,  all 


106  THE  PSYCHOLOGICAL  VIEW 

certitude  would  found  the  world  of  human  reason  as  the  East- 
Indian  myth  founded  the  world  of  matter.  But  the  world  of 
human  reason  is  a  self-supporting  and  self-sufficient  cosmos, 
rather  than  a  flat  and  level  expanse,  resting  on  the  back  of  an 
elephant,  supported  by  a  tortoise,  —  and  so  on. 

Or,  to  bring  somewhat  the  same  truth  before  us  in  a  state- 
ment even  more  naively  adapted  to  make  it  self-evident,  no 
other  kind  of  knowledge  is  possible,  or  even  conceivable  for 
us  men  but  human  knowledge,  — or  just  such  knowledge  as  all 
men  know  themselves  to  have.  This  is  a  primary  and  invin- 
cible epistemological  postulate.  The  picture  of  a  divine  in- 
tuition that  should  have  no  thought  in  it,  as  Kant  attempts 
repeatedly  to  sketch  the  picture,  is  as  purely  imaginary  as  the 
conceit  of  a  dialectical  unfolding  of  concepts  that  never  come 
to  a  resting-place  in  any  intuitive  knowledge.  But  both  are 
alike  due  to  the  unwarrantable  hypostasizing  of  a  one-sided 
recognition  of  the  work  actually  done  by  all  human  cognitive 
faculty.  The  effort  to  exalt  cognition  by  stripping  it  of  some 
of  the  fundamental  qualifications  which  belong  to  it  in  a  living 
human  experience,  and  then  to  set  it  over  against  its  actual 
self  as  a  something  worthy  of  envy  by  itself,  if  only  it  could 
be  attained,  always  ends  in  the  very  opposite  of  what  is  in- 
tended. If  our  human  knowledge  cannot  be  shown  to  include 
some  sure  envisagement,  so  to  speak,  or  trustworthy  mental 
representation  of  the  being  and  doings  of  the  Really  Existent, 
then  no  other  knowledge  more  inclusive  can  ever  be  the  object 
of  our  striving  or  even  the  subject  of  our  inquiry. 

Let  us,  then,  from  the  beginning,  renounce  all  vague  long- 
ings and  vain  efforts  after  the  absurd  and  the  impossible.  It 
is  not  to  dehumanize  ourselves  by  a  self-apotheosis  that  we  are 
called.  But,  on  the  other  hand,  it  is  not  to  animalize  ourselves 
by  reducing  man's  birthright  to  the  limitations  of  a  merely 
sensational  and  ideating  consciousness.  Epistemology  does 
not  propose  to  enter  upon  the  manufacture  of  knowledge,  by 
putting  inferior  raw  stuffs  into  an  empty  receptacle  and  taking 


THE  PSYCHOLOGICAL  VIEW  107 

out  the  finished  product  as  the  resultant  of  their  combination, 
before  a  bewildered  crowd  of  spectators.  The  mystery  of  cog- 
nition will  certainly  not  be  diminished,  it  will  very  likely  be 
not  a  little  increased,  by  what  the  most  accurate  and  thorough 
analysis  can  accomplish.  Nor  can  the  seeker  after  a  critical 
theory  of  knowledge  secure  or  maintain  any  standpoint  supe- 
rior to  that  of  the  multitude  of  rational  souls,  from  which  to 
view  the  nature,  or  to  discover  the  certification,  of  cognitive 
faculty.  What  he  finds  of  the  super  natural  must  be  imma- 
nent in,  or  implicate  within,  the  nature  of  all  mankind  ;  what 
of  the  divine  must  still  be  clothed  in  recognizable  human  garb. 
Or,  to  drop  all  figures  of  speech,  the  thorough  analysis  and 
reflective  discussion  of  the  cognitive  faculty  of  man — how  it 
behaves,  how  it  grows,  what  is  implied  in  it  by  way  of  feeling, 
faith,  envisagement,  postulate,  or  other  form  of  implicate  — 
is  all  that  the  psychology  and  philosophy  of  knowledge  can 
rightly  aim  to  accomplish. 

The  details  of  the  first  introspective  and  experimental  an- 
alysis, and  the  resulting  descriptive  history  of  human  cogni- 
tion belong  to  psychology.1  As  to  the  Nature  of  Knowledge, 
psychologically  considered,  it  will  then  be  necessary  here 
only  to  call  attention  to  the  following  series  of  propositions, 
which  form  the  basis  of  further  reflective  thinking  upon  the 
epistemological  problem. 

All  cognition  is  consciousness.  The  reverse  proposition, 
that  all  consciousness  is  cognition,  by  no  means  follows. 
What  consciousness  is  in  general,  or  what  is  any  particular 
form  or  modification  of  consciousness,  cannot,  of  course,  be 
known  without  assuming  the  activity  of  self-cognizing  faculty. 
This  amounts  to  saying  that  without  self-consciousness  there 
can  be  no  science  of  knowledge  ;  and  that  the  systematic  study 
of  the  nature,  growth,  and  implicates  of  knowledge  demands 
highly  developed  activities  of  the  self-conscious  order.  There 

1  For  these  details  see  the  author's  "  Psychology,  Descriptive  and  Explana- 
tory," especially  chapters  xiv.,  xv.,  xvi.,  xx.,  xxii. 


108  THE  PSYCHOLOGICAL  VIEW 

is  abundant  indirect  evidence,  however,  that  all  the  very  earli- 
est, most  of  the  earlier,  and  many  of  the  later  modifications 
of  the  "  stream  of  consciousness,"  neither  of  themselves 
amount  to  cognition,  nor  do  they  terminate  in  a  mental  atti- 
tude which  can  properly  be  called  an  act,  or  fact  of  cognition. 
But,  on  the  other  hand,  a  continuous  stream  of  cerebrations, 
a  psychic  act  or  factor,  or  an  inference  that  is  not  in  and  of 
consciousness,  certainly  cannot  have  the  epithet  cognitive 
attached  to  itself.  The  extremest  form  of  a  mind-stuff  the- 
ory, the  older  or  newer  forms  of  the  Leibnitzian  hypothesis, 
which  assume  an  unbroken  series  of  consciousnesses,  varying 
from  zero  to  the  unity  of  developed  apperceptive  self-con- 
sciousness whether  correlated  or  not  with  physical  and  neural 
aggregates,  have  no  bearing  on  the  problem  of  epistemology. 
The  conception  of  "  unconscious  knowledge  "  remains  not  only 
untenable,  but  even  impossible  to  frame.  One  may  be  par- 
doned, perhaps,  for  saying  "  I  must  have  felt  (or  imagined  or 
inferred)  it  to  be  so  without  being  fully  conscious  at  the 
time ; "  but  one  cannot  say  "  I  knew  it,  and  yet  I  was 
unconscious  when  I  knew." 

Whatever  may  be  held  as  to  the  possibility  of  certain  lower 
forms  of  psychic  manifestation  being  correlated  with  the 
functioning  of  the  sporadic  ganglia  and  spinal  cord  of  the 
lower  animals,  or  with  the  different  parts  of  those  worms 
which  allow  of  subdivision  without  loss  of  animation,  or 
with  the  different  micro-organisms,  or  even  with  the  life  of 
the  plants,  cognition  appears  to  require  a  highly  elaborate 
nervous  organism  crowned  by  a  cerebral  development. 
In  Schopenhauer's  careless  language,  knowledge  of  under- 
standing is  only  the  phenomenon  of  the  self-objectifica- 
tion  of  Will  in  the  brain.  It  is  not  necessary  to  occupy 
ourselves  with  the  crudities  of  this,  or  of  any  other  material- 
istic hypothesis  on  this  subject.  But  the  biological  connec- 
tion of  that  most  elaborate  physical  organism,  the  brain,  with 
the  life  of  conscious  cognition  is  full  of  meaning.  The  white 


THE   PSYCHOLOGICAL  VIEW  109 

blood-corpuscles  can  do  certain  wonderful  and  purposeful 
things ;  and  so  can  the  cilia  on  a  bit  of  skin  from  the  throat 
of  the  frog.  So  can  microbes,  and  harmful  germs,  and  helpful 
germicides,  innumerable.  How  much  of  such  doing,  which 
seems  full  of  a  sort  of  knowing  (a  Kennen,  if  not  a  Wisseri),  is 
really  dependent  on  or  is,  at  least,  correlated  with  "  momenta  " 
of  consciousness,  even  if  they  are  not  organized  into  a  stream 
of  consciousness,  one  cannot  very  confidently  affirm.  But 
when  we  approach  an  act  of  cognition,  properly  so-called,  we 
have  long  since  passed  beyond  the  border-land  of  the  uncon- 
scious. To  speak  of  unconscious  knowledge  would  be  no  less 
absurd  than  to  speak  of  "  wooden  iron."  Just  as  the  physi- 
cal basis  of  all  psychic  life  reaches  its  culmination,  puts  forth 
its  supremely  noble  blossom  in  the  convoluted  hemispheres 
of  the  human  brain,  so  does  the  life  of  consciousness  reach  its 
supreme  manifestation,  its  crowning  achievement  in  those 
forms  of  consciousness,  called  acts  of  knowledge,  which 
depend  upon  the  employment  in  their  integrity  of  these 
hemispheres. 

All  cognition  is  a  conscious  process,  a  process  in  con- 
sciousness. But  not  only  has  each  act  of  cognition  a  con- 
scious character;  it  has  also  a  becoming  of  its  own  character; 
it  is  a  coming  to  a  peculiar  kind  of  consciousness.  The 
experimental  demonstration  of  this  truth,  too,  is  complete. 
Reaction-time  is  prolonged  in  some  sort  of  proportion  to 
the  extent,  the  certainty,  and  the  clearness  of  the  cognitive 
process  which  it  measures.  If  mere  sensation  is  called  for, 
and  signalled  as  arising  in  consciousness,  then  the  reaction- 
time  is  relatively  short.  If  sensation,  more  accurately 
discriminated  as  to  quantity  or  quality  by  comparison  with 
a  memory-image  is  demanded,  then  reaction-time  is  more 
prolonged.  But  if  the  full-orbed  and  perfected  act  of  cogni- 
tion, resulting  in  judgment  that  posits  a  relation  between 
self  and  its  object,  with  the  essential  accompanying  seizure 
of  will  and  feeling  of  certitude,  is  demanded,  then  still  more 


110  THE  PSYCHOLOGICAL  VIEW 

time  must  be  allowed  for  the  achievement  of  so  elaborate  a 
conscious  process. 

Moreover,  each  act  of  cognition,  so  far  as  its  time-rate,  its 
order  of  the  succession  in  fusion  of  different  psychic  factors, 
and  its  richness,  clearness,  and  distinctive  characteristics 
of  content  are  concerned,  is  an  individual  affair.  No  two 
human  beings  are  alike  in  these  particular  features  of  their 
cognitive  faculty.  Habits  and  "types,"  in  multiform  combi- 
nations of  the  different  kinds  of  sensation,  and  of  intellec- 
tive, affective,  and  voluntary  activity,  characterize  the 
individuality  of  every  person.  They  also  impart  individual- 
ity to  each  exercise  of  the  complex  faculty  of  cognition.  To 
know  this  or  that  thing,  even  by  the  most  immediate  and 
rapid  of  observations,  is  a  different  affair  for  different 
minds;  a  different  affair  also  for  the  same  mind  at  different 
moments  of  its  experience.  The  unceasing  and  infinite 
variation  of  that  species  of  mental  states  which  we  call 
cognitions  shows  that  they  are  all,  properly  speaking,  not 
mere  states  or  statical  conditions  of  consciousness,  but  con- 
scious processes  or  changing  modes  of  the  conscious  pro- 
cedures of  psychic  life.  Special  experiment  and  ordinary 
experience  alike  prove  that,  within  limits,  the  introduction 
of  new  elements,  whether  arising  through  external  stim- 
ulus or  from  internal  sources,  and  with  or  without  con- 
scious volition,  changes  the  character  of  the  cognitive  issue; 
this  it  does  by  affecting  the  "stream  of  consciousness." 
After  it  gets  started,  so  to  speak,  we  can  disturb,  divert, 
modify  the  exercise  of  cognitive  faculty  so  as  to  alter  more 
or  less  profoundly  the  concluding  judgment  which  marks 
the  attainment  of  knowledge.  Cognition  regarded  as  result- 
ant depends  upon  the  influences  which  determine  the  cogni- 
tion regarded  as  a  process ;  but  it  is  also  a  matter  of  sure 
proof  that  cognition  is  itself  a  process  having  a  certain 
termination,  appropriate  or  perhaps  peculiar  to  itself. 

This  truth  regarding  the  psychological  nature  of  every  gen- 


THE  PSYCHOLOGICAL  VIEW  111 

uine  act  of  knowledge  can  be  brought  clearly  before  self- 
consciousness  in  cases  where  the  conscious  process  is  at  the 
same  time  slowly  evolved,  yet  vivid  and  picturesque,  and  is 
watched  and  remembered  with  interest  and  accuracy  of  intro- 
spection. For  example :  I  am  standing  at  the  street's  corner, 
waiting  for  a  car  and  looking  straight  before  me,  but  ab- 
sorbed in  thought  about  a  lecture  to  be  given  later  in  the  day 
in  a  neighboring  city.  Suddenly  the  stream  of  reflective 
consciousness  is  interrupted.  All  at  once  I  become  con- 
scious of  an  obscurely  perceived  (but,  by  no  means,  clearly 
apperceived)  human  figure  which  seems  struggling  toward 
the  focus  of  attention  in  the  field  of  consciousness,  of  a  feel- 
ing which  is  a  mixture  of  pleasure  in  recognition  and  of 
perplexity  as  to  the  propriety  of  recognition,  and  of  a  dis- 
tinct motor  tendency  to  bow  and  to  raise  my  hat.  This 
complex  mental  "  state "  (which  is  not  itself,  however,  a 
status,  a  stationary  experience)  almost  immediately  fuses 
with  another  state  in  which  the  perception-content  has  more 
clearly  defined  itself  —  sensation-wise  and  memory-wise; 
now  the  feeling  has  become  a  mixture  of  disappointed  expec- 
tation and  of  lingering  though  fast  failing  doubt;  and  the 
motor  consciousness  is  chiefly  that  of  a  strongly  inhibited 
tendency  to  move  the  arm  upward  and  to  stare  at  the  ap- 
proaching form  with  inquiring  eyes.  And,  finally,  the  psychic 
process  that  started  off  on  the  way  to  an  act  of  cognition 
which  would  have  been  recognition  of  a  friend,  with  its  ap- 
propriate affective  and  motor  accompaniments  or  commingled 
factors,  has  become  a  completed  cognition  of  an  object  clearly 
differentiated  from  the  object  expected,  a  self-recognition  of 
the  just  previous  mistaken  attitude  of  the  mind  toward  its 
object,  with  the  appropriate  changes  in  the  affective  and 
motor  accompaniments.  To  use  the  language  of  every-day 
life :  At  first  I  saw  the  approaching  person  very  dimly,  but 
half-unconsciously  fancied  it  was  my  friend,  felt  pleased, 
and  was  about  to  raise  my  hat  and  extend  my  hand.  Then  I 


112  THE  PSYCHOLOGICAL  VIEW 

saw   more   clearly,    though   not  with   perfect   distinctness, 
doubted  my  just  rising  judgment,  experienced  a  reversal  of 
feeling  and  a  check   to  the  motor   activities  which   I  had 
begun.     Finally,  I  clearly  and  indubitably  saw  that  the  per- 
son was  not  the  one  I  had  at  first  imagined,  then  judged  with- 
out further  hesitation,  "  I  do  not  know  you,"  and  deliberately 
suppressed  the  rising  tide  of  friendly  feeling  and  the  actions 
which  were  to  give  it  expression.     All  this,  however,  occu- 
pied not  more  than  a  second  and  a  half.     The  total  expe- 
rience was  not  three  successive  and  separate  states,  or  statical 
conditions,    of    consciousness;  it   was    one    living   process, 
terminating  in  knowledge.     Physiologically  described,  what 
probably  happened  was  this.     The  cerebral  hemispheres,  in 
which  the  physical  basis  of  cognitive  consciousness  is  laid, 
were  preoccupied  with  those  molecular   changes  which  are 
the  conjectural  correlate  of  the  process  of  thinking  rather 
than  of  sense-perception.      The  lower  ganglia  and  centres 
of  the  brain  responded  promptly  and  effectively  —  accord- 
ing  to   the   power  which    in   them    lies  —  to    the    sensory 
impulses  thrown   in    upon   them   along  the  nerve-tracts  of 
vision.     Certain  ideation    and   motor   responses   habitually 
connected  with   similar  impulses  were  awakened   in   these 
lower  centres;    and   the    impulses  were   started    down   the 
motor-tracts.     But  as  these  sensory  impulses,  in  the  succes- 
sive fractions  of  the  second   and  a  half  rose,  spread  over, 
and  mastered  the  higher  centres  of  the  brain,  the  character 
of  the  ideation  and  motor  responses  became  changed.     The 
new  form  now  given  to  the  latter  overtook  the  earlier  motor 
impulses   and   inhibited   them    before    they   could   get  the 
muscles   well   under  way.      Psychologically   described   and 
explained,  however,  we  have  here  a  cognitive  process,  going 
on  to  its  completion  in  that  mental  attitude  which  is  called 
judgment,  with  its  consciously  recognized  content,  its  feel- 
ing of  certitude  and  other  affective  moods,  its  support  and 
outcome  in  volition  as  engaged  in  attention  or  otherwise,  — 


THE  PSYCHOLOGICAL  VIEW  113 

all  under  the  mind's  eye.     In  one  word,  we  have  the  birth 
of  cognition,  self-consciously  known  as  a  conscious  process. 

All  cognition,  moreover,  is  objective  consciousness,  or 
awareness  of  an  object.  As  to  the  ultimate  nature  and  sig- 
nificance for  man's  intellectual,  moral,  and  religious  life,  of 
the  object  given  to  consciousness  in  cognition,  it  is  the  busi- 
ness of  the  appropriate  philosophical  disciplines  to  inquire. 
But  at  present  it  is  simply  the  objective  nature  of  cognition 
as  displayed  in  indisputable  psychological  facts,  upon  which 
emphasis  is  laid.  Unless  the  process  of  consciousness  be- 
comes objective,  unless  the  stream  of  consciousness  termi- 
nates in  a  "  position  "  taken  and  regarded  by  the  conscious 
subject,  as  corresponding  to  the  nature  and  behavior  of  the 
known  object,  we  have  no  right  to  speak  of  it  as  knowledge. 
Mere  sensation,  mere  belief,  mere  association  of  ideas,  mere 
thinking,  may  perhaps  be  conceived  of,  if  not  actually 
experienced,  as  merely  subjective;  but  knowledge  cannot 
even  be  so  conceived  of,  or  thought  about.  By  its  very 
nature  it  is  always  objective.  Conversely,  whatever  state, 
condition,  activity,  or  process,  in  consciousness  is  capable  of 
being  considered  as  merely  subjective,  such  state,  condition, 
activity  or  process  is  never  to  be  called  "knowledge." 
Sensation,  belief,  association  of  ideas,  thinking,  may  all  be 
considered  as  constituents  of  cognition;  without  them  all,  no 
cognition  were  possible.  But  merely  as  such,  whether  single 
or  in  combination,  without  acquiring  by  the  combination 
something  more  than  their  inherent  subjective  quality,  they 
cannot  be  identified  with  cognition.  Indeed,  it  is  this  pecu- 
liar characteristic  of  objectivity  which,  as  was  seen  when  we 
were  extricating  and  defining  the  epistemological  problem 
(Chap.  I.  passim),  starts  the  critical  philosophy  of  knowledge 
upon  the  basis  of  the  full  and  accurate  psychological  descrip- 
tion of  the  nature  of  knowledge. 

Of  all  the  profitless  fallacies  of  psychology,  old  or  new, 
that  is  perhaps  supreme  which  explains  the  act  of  cognition 

8 


114  THE  PSYCHOLOGICAL  VIEW 

by  explaining  away  its  peculiar  matter-of-fact  characteris- 
tics. In  combating  these  fallacies  at  their  initial  position, 
fortunately  or  unfortunately  nothing  can  be  done  which  is 
more  effective  than  to  insist  upon  the  actual  facts  of  the 
case.  These  facts  are  given,  in  spite  of  any  contradictory 
or  disputatious  doctrine  of  so-called  psychological  science, 
in  every  plain  man's  consciousness.  "Fortunately  or  unfor- 
tunately, "  it  has  just  been  said.  "  Unfortunately "  so,  if 
those  students  of  psychological  science  who  wish  to  accept 
the  concrete  and  content-full  actuality  of  mental  life  must 
be  compelled  to  refute  by  arguments  those  who  would  rule 
out  of  their  account  much  more  than  half  of  this  actuality. 
"Fortunately"  so  because,  when  the  very  nature  of  science 
and  of  its  proofs  is  understood,  it  is  found  that  the  postu- 
lated objectivity  of  knowledge  lies  at  the  base  of  all  scien- 
tific research  and  scientific  discovery.  Indeed,  without  it, 
the  very  word  "  science  "  has  no  meaning  in  such  connection. 
There  are  several  current  and  yet  specious  ways  of  speak- 
ing, which  may  or  may  not  amount  to  a  denial  of  the  real 
objectivity  of  all  cognition.  We  are  often  told,  for  example, 
that  knowledge  can  only  be  "of  phenomena."  By  this  it  is 
ordinarily  intended  to  carry  some  such  concealed  syllogism 
as  the  following:  Knowledge  is  merely  subjective;  its 
object  is  necessarily  no  thing  but  what  appears  to  conscious- 
ness. Its  object  is  subjective,  mere  appearance  to  the  sub- 
ject. Therefore  it  is  illusory;  and  cognition  must  not  be 
supposed  to  afford  a  correct  picture  or  other  mental  repre- 
sentation of  Reality.  All  knowledge  is  only  "of  phenom- 
ena. "  Now  some  of  this  and  of  all  similar  talk  is  undoubtedly 
true,  is  merely  correct  statement  of  incontestable  psycho- 
logical fact.  But  most  of  it  is  just  as  undoubtedly  false 
from  the  start,  and  contradictory  of  incontestable  fact.  It 
is  true,  as  has  just  been  admitted,  that  knowledge  is  always 
essentially  of  consciousness,  a  conscious  process;  therefore 
subjective.  It  is  also  true  that  the  object  given  to  the  grasp 


THE  PSYCHOLOGICAL  VIEW  115 

of  consciousness,  whenever  an  act  of  cognition  is  completed, 
is  my  object,  is  the  thing  as  known  to  me.  It  may  then  — 
borrowing  a  figure  of  speech  derived  from  certain  acts  of 
vision  which  is  helpful,  but,  like  all  other  figures  of  speech, 
needs  careful  interpretation  —  be  called  "a  phenomenon," 
or  appearance  to  me  in  my  consciousness.  But  it  is  the 
very  reverse  of  the  truth  to  say  that  knowledge  is  merely 
subjective;  for  until  the  stream  of  consciousness,  the  state 
or  activity  of  the  knowing  subject,  has  become  also  objec- 
tive, cognition  has  not  taken  place.  The  very  problem 
in  epistemology,  which  excites  the  greatest  interest  and  calls 
out  the  supreme  critical  effort,  is  just  this:  How  shall  we 
account  for  the  undoubted  and  indubitable  fact  that  my 
subjective  experience  can  be  objectively  determined,  can 
become  knowledge  of  an  object  ? 

"In  vain  is  the  snare  spread  in  the  sight  of  any  bird." 
And  this  proverb  ought  to  prove  true,  no  matter  how  foolish 
the  bird  or  how  skilful  the  fowler.  For  suppose  that  one  is 
again  reminded:  "Yes,  undoubtedly  the  phenomenon  you 
know  appears  to  you  as  an  object,  in  the  fullest  meaning  of 
that  word,  even  as  a  really  and  eatfra-mentally  existent 
Thing ;  but  so  it  only  appears,  so  you  think  it  to  be,  and  so 
it  is  as  phenomenon  merely. "  The  answer  of  escape  is  ready 
as  soon  as  the  meshes  of  this  net  are  made  visible.  It  may 
be  made  in  this  way:  Thus  stated,  the  conclusion  totally 
perverts  and  squarely  contradicts  the  facts  of  experience. 
For  the  very  nature  of  every  object  of  my  cognition  is  such 
that,  as  object,  it  refuses  to  be  identified  with  my  subjective 
condition;  it  will  not  be  described  as  my  sensation,  or  my 
thought,  merely;  or  as  mere  appearance  to  me,  as  only  a 
phenomenon.  So  that  the  problem  remains,  deeply  and 
inextricably  woven  into  every  portion  of  my  most  funda- 
mental experience :  How  shall  I  account  for  the  undoubted 
fact  that  when  I  know,  the  object  of  my  knowledge  is  not 
mere  phenomenon  ?  Surely,  to  tell  one  that  cognition  is 


116  THE  PSYCHOLOGICAL  VIEW" 

only  of  phenomena  is  to  ask  one  to  accept  an  explanation 
which  begins  by  explaining  away  the  very  i'acts  which  consti- 
tute the  problem.  "  Nor  is  it  true  "  —  to  quote  from  Stumpf l 
—  "  that  natural  science  deals  only  with  phenomena.  There 
is  not  a  single  natural  law  which  admits  of  being  expressed 
as  a  law  of  mere  phenomena. " 

Not  more  happy  and  profound,  though  more  convincing  to 
a  large  number,  is  the  declaration  that  man  can  know  only 
his  own  states  of  consciousness.  Here,  too,  there  is  truth  of 
fact  mixed  up  with  error  in  fact  and  falsehood  in  inference. 
That  all  knowledge  is  a  state  of  some  one's  consciousness,  or 
rather,  a  conscious  process  belonging  to  the  life-history  of 
some  mind,  is  a  fact  that  cannot  be  doubted.  And  how 
absurd  it  is  to  ask  for  some  other  knowledge  that  takes  its 
standpoints  outside  of  or  above  the  laws  of  human  conscious- 
ness, or  for  a  cognition  that  is  other  than  human  cognition, 
has  surely  been  affirmed  quite  often  enough.  But  to  say 
that  I  can  know  only  "states,"  and  among  conceivable 
"states,"  only  such  as  I  am  obliged  to  refer  to  my  Self  as 
"my  own  "  states  is  to  contradict  twice  over  the  plainest  and 
most  universal  facts  of  knowledge.  Indeed,  it  would  be  truer 
to  the  actual,  concrete  experience  of  mankind  to  remark  that 
one  can  never  know  any  mere  "states  of  consciousness," 
much  less  one's  own  states  simply.  For  knowledge  is  not 
more  truly  to  be  described  as  "  of  states  "  than  it  is  to  be 
described  as  "  of  phenomena. "  Properly  speaking,  such  ex- 
treme solipsistic  psychology  is  a  meagre  and  yet  false  way 
of  identifying  cognition  with  self-consciousness.  To  be  con- 
sistent, it  must  end  with  the  denial  of  cognition  altogether; 
and  it  must  couch  this  denial  in  terms  so  absurd  as  really  to 
be  unstatable. 

It  may  be  granted,  as  an  assumption  implied  in  a  construc- 
tive theory  of  psychology,  that  having  states  of  consciousness 
does  not  necessarily  imply  cognizing  them  as  one's  own.  In 

1  Psychologic  und  Erkenntnisatheorie,  p.  316. 


THE  PSYCHOLOGICAL  VIEW  117 

other  words,  being  conscious  and  being  self-conscious,  even 
if  a  trace  of  the  latter  be  involved  in  every  known  case  of 
the  former,  are  not  identical  processes.  But  it  must  be,  not 
simply  granted  as  an  assumption,  but  also  recognized  as  a 
fact,  that  to  speak  of  a  knowledge  "  of  states  only  "  is  to 
misrepresent  all  our  cognitive  experience.  That  which  is 
given  to  the  cognizing  subject  as  its  object  in  every  act  of 
cognition,  is  something  more  than  "states,"  whether  of  his 
own  or  of  another  being.  Indeed,  the  very  word,  whether  used 
as  applied  to  the  self  or  to  things  as  known  by  the  self,  is 
a  relative  term ;  and  this  word  no  more  fitly  represents  a  real 
object  of  cognition  than  do  phrases  such  as  "  pure  "  substance 
(or  substance  unqualified)  or  "  pure  "  quality  (qualification, 
that  is,  which  qualifies  nothing,  and  is  —  so  to  speak  —  auf 
der  Luft).  What  is  meant  by  "states,"  and  by  all  terms 
which  can  be  substituted  for  this  term,  is  the  more  or  less 
continuous  condition  of  some  being,  its  mode  of  existence  or 
of  behavior  regarded  as  filling  an  interval  of  time.  If,  then, 
we  mean  to  limit  the  cognitive  faculty  of  man  by  identifying 
the  object  of  cognition  with  his  own  states  simply,  and  thus 
to  deny  its  power  to  apprehend  or  comprehend  real  beings  as 
in  those  states,  we  make  the  mistake  of  identifying  an  ab- 
straction with  an  actuality.  This  mistake  is  the  more  fatal 
because  it  happens  at  the  very  beginning  of  an  analysis  of 
the  genuine  act  of  knowledge.  Phenomenalism  and  the  ex- 
tremes of  individual  idealism  are  forever,  professedly,  fight- 
ing shy  of  abstractions.  They  exhibit  an  anxiety,  usually 
earnest  but  often  excessive,  to  get  at  the  concrete  facts  and 
to  tell  a  plain,  unvarnished  tale  about  them.  Hence  the 
customary  amount  of  polemic  in  the  treatises  on  mental  life 
produced  by  them,  and  which  is  directed  against  hypostasiz- 
ing  the  results  of  the  thinking  faculty.  But  what,  taken  at 
its  literal  worth,  is  this  conclusion  which  they  themselves 
support  ?  It  is  an  hypostasis  of  the  abstract  and  purely 
imaginary  statical  condition  of  a  being,  which  is  made  to 


118  THE  PSYCHOLOGICAL  VIEW 

take  the  place  of  the  living  and  acting  reality.  The  ab- 
straction ends  in  a  denial  of  the  possibility  of  knowledge, 
because  the  essential  and  unique  characteristic  of  the  act  of 
knowledge,  as  determined  by  its  objectivity,  is  removed  from 
the  primary  fact  of  experience.  This  characteristic  assures 
us  that  the  object  of  cognition  never  is,  and  never  can  be 
defined  as  "states  only;"  it  ever  is,  and  ever  must  be, 
"  existences  in  states, "  —  real  beings  that  are  suffering  or 
acting  in  certain  ways. 

Suppose,  however,  that  the  primary  psychological  datum 
as  regards  the  object  of  knowledge  is  somewhat  more  gener- 
ously treated,  while  stated  in  terms  of  essentially  the  same 
theory.  We  are  now  invited  to  consider  the  declaration 
that  the  only  possible  object  of  cognition  is  the  being  I  call 
myself,  as  known  to  myself  in  its  various  successive  states. 
"  1  can  know  only  my  own  states  of  consciousness  "  now  be- 
comes equivalent  to  this :  The  only  way  of  certified  knowing 
is,  after  all,  self -consciousness,  and  the  only  kind  of  imme- 
diate knowledge  is  the  knowledge  of  the  Self  —  my  Self  (a 
word  which  may  be  identified,  according  to  the  psychologist's 
humor  toward  the  prospect  of  ethical  and  theological  conse- 
quences, either  with  the  so-called  "empirical  Ego"  or  with 
a  Ding-an-sich  Ego  which  forever  calls  forth  but  deludes  and 
eludes  its  own  cognitive  powers).  The  false  positions  and 
mistakes  in  philosophy  which  follow  upon  setting  such  a 
limitation  to  the  objectivity  of  knowledge,  will  continually 
appear  more  clearly  as  our  epistemological  analysis  moves 
forward.  It  is  sufficient  at  present  to  notice  that  the  con- 
clusion at  which  this  theory  of  knowledge  arrives,  and 
usually  without  any  sufficient  show  of  examination  or  argu- 
ment, is  all  involved  in  its  starting  with  a  denial  of  the 
plainest  facts  of  the  conscious  cognitive  process.  That  pro- 
cess is,  in  its  very  essence,  as  experienced  by  every  man, 
objective  with  reference  to,  and  with  implicates  of,  a  not-self^ 
—  this,  just  as  certainly  and  truly  as  of  a  self-conscious  Self. 


THE   PSYCHOLOGICAL  VIEW  119 

Perception  by  the  senses,  when  it  reaches  full-orbed  apper- 
ceptive  cognition,  is  just  as  undoubtedly  an  act  involving  the 
reality  of  its  object,  as  is  the  clearest,  completest  conscious- 
ness of  one's  own  states.  What  philosophy  has  to  say  of  the 
more  ultimate  natures,  and  of  the  relations  in  reality,  of  these 
two  classes  of  objects,  does  not  concern  the  present  argument. 
Be  the  outcome  of  further  reflective  thinking  some  form  of 
dualism  or  of  monism,  of  realism  or  of  idealism,  the  nature 
of  the  primary  act  of  cognition  remains  unchanged.  And  it 
is  this  from  which  all  epistemological  theory  takes  its  point 
of  starting.  It  is  this  to  which  it  returns  for  the  testing  of 
its  validity  as  conformable  to  the  facts  of  experience.  It  is 
this  to  which  fidelity  must  be  maintained  at  any  cost  to 
the  smoothness  and  consistency  of  the  theory.  For  if  this 
is  lost,  all  is  lost.  The  denial  of  the  full  import  of  the 
primary  acts  of  cognition  is  the  denial  of  the  possibility  of 
knowledge  of  any  kind ;  it  is  the  abandonment  of  all  attempt 
at  a  critical  epistemology. 

Much  more  than  a  numerical  half  of  our  earlier  cognitions, 
and  these  the  more  impressive  and  important  for  the  safety 
and  development  of  our  entire  spiritual  life,  have  for  their 
objects  the  states  and  relations  of  things.  About  these 
objects  the  "  plain  man's "  consciousness  affirms,  and  not 
without  a  strong  show  of  reason,  a  more  immediate  and 
certain  knowledge  than  about  its  own  states.  Psychological 
investigation  demonstrates,  indeed,  that  the  affirmation  is 
not  altogether  well  chosen;  for  no  objects  can  excel,  in 
the  immediacy  of  their  presentation  and  the  strength  of 
accompanying  conviction,  those  that  are  presented  in  self- 
consciousness.  However,  our  scientifically  assured  position 
on  this  point  must  not  lead  us  to  disparage  or  overlook  the 
character  of  the  testimony  which  every-day  experience  gives 
to  the  immediacy  and  certainty  of  the  knowledge  of  things. 
So  far  as  obvious  and  recognizable  independence  and  per- 
manency of  existence  are  concerned,  things  appear  to  have 


120  THE  PSYCHOLOGICAL   VIEW 

the  advantage  over  Self.  It  is  perhaps  only  when  we  intro- 
duce certain  ideas  of  value,  and  so  consider  whether  the 
Self  should  desire  to  be  independent  and  permanent  pre- 
cisely in  the  way  in  which  things  are,  that  the  former 
regains  its  position  of  superior  advantage.  On  what  ground, 
then,  does  epistemological  theory  deny  the  affirmation  of 
the  universal  consciousness  that,  in  a  large  proportion 
of  those  cases  where  the  fullest  activity  of  cognitive  func- 
tion is  employed  and  the  fullest  certitude  of  cognition 
achieved,  the  object  of  knowledge  is  decidedly  not  my  state 
of  consciousness,  nor  any  state  of  any  man's  conscious- 
ness ?  The  nature  of  the  primary  act  of  cognition  by 
sense-perception  refuses  to  adjust  itself  to  such  a  denial. 

But  at  this  point,  in  the  effort  to  escape  the  full  force  of 
the  testimony  derived  from  every  act  of  cognition  to  the 
truth  that  all  cognition  is  objective  consciousness,  resort 
may  be  had  to  a  deceptive  ambiguity  in  the  meaning  of 
the  word  "  object. "  Kant's  critique  of  knowledge  is  full  of 
perplexities  due  to  this  ambiguity.  Because  any  adequate 
account  of  the  possibility  of  objective  knowledge  requires 
that  the  constitutional  forms  of  the  knowing  subject  should 
be  recognized,  it  does  not  follow  that  this  recognition  fur- 
nishes the  entire  account  of  all  our  objective  knowledge. 
For  example,  I  take  my  stand  in  receptive  or  more  active 
apperceptive  attitude  before  some  natural  object.  I  am 
using  my  senses  to  get  a  knowledge  of  this  bit  of  mineral  I 
have  just  picked  up  in  the  field.  Looking,  feeling,  smell- 
ing, tasting,  recalling  what  I  have  seen  and  been  told  before, 
filling  out  the  picture  with  imaginings  as  to  how  it  would 
behave  should  I  subject  it  to  certain  physical  and  chemical 
tests,  and  reflectively  thinking  over  the  whole  case,  I  judge 
it  to  be  "  a  piece  of  feldspar. "  If  the  grounds  of  the  final 
judgment,  on  reviewing  them,  seem  satisfactory,  I  say:  "I 
know  it  is  a  piece  of  feldspar."  I  have,  in  arriving  at 
knowledge  of  this  sort,  reached  an  elaborate  objective  con- 


THE  PSYCHOLOGICAL  VIEW  121 

sciousness  of  this  thing.  Now  suppose,  however,  that  in 
order  to  explain  such  objectivity  of  consciousness,  epistemo- 
logical  criticism  points  out  how,  in  addition  to  "  receptivity 
of  sensibility"  and  "synthesis  of  imagination,"  there  must 
have  been  "activity  of  intellect,"  functioning  according  to 
one  or  more  of  the  constitutional  forms  of  intellectual  func- 
tion (the  so-called  "  categories ").  This  it  is,  I  am  now 
informed,  in  the  name  of  a  critique  of  pure  reason,  which 
makes  the  consciousness  objective;  all  external  objects  are 
made  to  be,  and  to  be  what  they  are,  by  the  intellect  itself. 
In  a  word,  to  know  things,  you  must  mind  them ;  or  —  as  is 
so  significantly  said  in  popular  speech  —  "put  your  mind 
into  them."  If  I  follow  the  path  of  criticism  myself,  I  may 
be  ready  to  admit  all  this  as  necessary  to  account  for  any 
"  objective  "  consciousness  whatever.  But  when  I  am  bidden 
to  accept  this  as  the  complete  and  final  account  of  knowl- 
edge, when  I  am  exhorted  to  believe  that  this  is  all  I  am 
sure  of  with  regard  to  the  existence  and  nature  of  the  ex- 
ternal object  of  knowledge,  and  that  this  it  is  which  makes 
it  an  object,  set  over  against  the  subject,  as  a  non-self  over 
against  the  Self,  in  the  very  act  of  cognition,  then  I  answer, 
"I  will  not,  because  I  cannot."  Nor  did  Kant  himself  con- 
sistently maintain  this  position;  because,  in  fact,  he  could 
not.  But  to  prove  our  statement  on  this  point  belongs  to 
the  criticism  of  the  Kantian  Critique  rather  than  to  the 
criticism  of  the  faculty  of  knowledge. 

The  characteristic  of  objectivity,  in  a  meaning  more  full 
than  either  of  the  three  foregoing  forms  of  limitation  admit, 
must  be  recognized  as  belonging  to  the  essential  nature  of 
all  cognition.  To  deny  this  characteristic  altogether  is  to 
commit  the  absurdity  of  beginning  a  criticism  of  knowing 
faculty  by  overlooking  the  most  essential  facts  which  need 
criticism.  It  is  virtually  to  assert  the  theoretical  impossi- 
bility of  knowledge.  To  define  this  objectivity  in  accordance 
with  the  phrases,  "Knowledge  is  only  of  phenomena;"  or, 


122  THE  PSYCHOLOGICAL  VIEW 

"  We  can  never  know  anything  but  our  own  states  of  con- 
sciousness,"  is  to  be  scarcely  less  absurd;  while  we  must 
not  be  deceived  into  accepting  off-hand  the  sceptical  or 
agnostic  attitude  toward  the  persuasion  that  in  knowledge 
we  somehow  come  into  valid  relations  with  extra-mental 
reality,  by  an  ambiguous  use  of  the  words  "  object "  and 
"  objective. "  Further  details  on  this  characteristic  of  cog- 
nition belong,  of  course,  to  the  main  body  of  cpistemology. 

Once  more,  the  psychological  nature  of  cognition  is  such 
as  to  involve  all  the  factors  and  forms  of  psychic  life  and  of 
psychic  activity.  If  we  are  to  speak  of  "cognitive  faculty" 
—  as  has  already  been  done  repeatedly  —  then  this  faculty 
calls  forth  and  summarizes,  by  absorption  into  itself,  as  it 
were,  all  other  faculties.  Whichever  of  the  current  psycho- 
logical divisions  into  faculties  be  adopted,  there  is  no  one 
of  them  whose  employment  is  not,  either  as  actually  dis- 
cernible or  as  theoretically  necessary,  contained  in  the  full 
account  of  human  cognition.  Take  away  any  of  these  facul- 
ties and  knowledge  would  become  either  much  less  than  it 
actually  is  or  else  actually  impossible.  But  none  of  them, 
drawn  off  from  and  considered  apart  from  the  others,  is  capa- 
ble of  achieving  an  act  of  cognition.  Without  content  of 
sensation  there  can  be  no  cognition  of  external  objects.  But 
almost  equally  obvious  is  the  psychological  truth  that  with- 
out this  same  content,  no  vital  and  warm  consciousness  of 
Self  could  arise ;  certainly,  no  development  of  the  knowledge 
which  comes  through  self-consciousness  is  possible  with- 
out the  delimitation  and  opposition  of  Self  and  Things  as 
dependent  upon  changes  in  the  nature  of  this  sensuous 
content.  Without  memory,  knowledge  of  the  past  would 
be  a  meaningless  phrase;  without  knowledge  of  the  past, 
through  memory,  present  knowledge  both  of  Things  and 
of  Self  would  be  impossible ;  and  growth  of  knowledge  for 
the  individual  or  the  race  could  not  take  place.  But  only 
as  the  form  of  psychic  life  called  imagination  is  at  work, 


THE  PSYCHOLOGICAL   VIEW  123 

can  there  be  constructed  in  consciousness  that  series  of 
mental  representations  which  forms  a  picture  for  thought  to 
modify,  and  for  faith  to  attach  itself  to,  as  a  true  picture  of 
the  transcendent  Reality.  Even  in  all  our  more  solid  and 
scientific  knowledge  of  natural  and  physical  objects,  psycho- 
logical analysis  shows  the  presence  of  a  sort  of  substitu- 
tionary  and  analogical  activity  of  phantasy.  For  all  such 
knowledge  requires  interpretation  based  upon  the  sympa- 
thetic projection  of  the  Self  into  the  situation  of  the  other. 
What  is  called  "knowledge  of  human  nature  "  is  confessedly 
dependent  upon  this  sort  of  faculty.  But  with  the  most 
exact  of  the  sciences,  with  mathematics  and  mathematical 
physics,  the  words  and  symbols  employed  cannot  serve 
either  as  the  vehicles  or  as  the  excitants  of  cognitive  pro- 
cesses, unless  this  activity  can  be  supplied  by  the  cognitive 
subject.  "  Molecular  "  and  "  atomic  "  motions,  "  stored  "  and 
"kinetic"  energies,  — these  and  similar  terms  have  no  life, 
no  warmth,  no  real  meaning  for  the  mind  of  man,  unless 
they  are  filled  with  the  blood  which  such  an  interpretative 
imagination  supplies.1 

Knowledge,  however,  is  not  a  passive  happening,  a  copying- 
off  of  reality  upon  an  impressionable  psychic  substance, 
or  a  solidarity  of  ideation-processes  empirically  produced. 
Neither  is  it  such  a  merely  reproductive  activity  that  the 
subject  in  which  the  activity  is  induced  goes  through  a 
series  of  processes  precisely  similar  to  those  gone  through 
with  by  the  reality,  regarded  as  stimulating  it  to  the  re- 
productive activity.  Thinking,  as  an  active  rational  form 
of  functioning,  must  take  in  hand  the  trains  of  associated 
ideas,  in  order  that  genuine  cognition  may  take  place. 
Thinking  becomes  cognition,  or  rather  leads  the  conscious 
processes  up  to  the  completed  cognitive  act,  when  judgment 

1  Die  Phantasie  ist  diejenige  Function  des  Denkens,  die  in  ihrer  Bedeutungjvr  die 
Wissenschaft,  fur  die  Weltauffassung  und  fur  die  Daseingestaltung  am  meisten  ver- 
kannt  wird.  —  DUEHRING,  Cursus  der  Philosophic,  p.  44. 


124  THE  PSYCHOLOGICAL  VIEW 

on  recognized  grounds  is  consciously  made.  All  the  more 
purely  intellectual  "momenta"  become  fused  in  that  total 
attitude  of  mind  toward  objective  reality,  which  is  most 
properly  called  knowledge,  only  when  such  judgment  is 
attained. 

But  how  necessary  to  every  act  of  cognition  are  other  than 
the  strictly  intellectual  "momenta,"  how  truly  knowledge 
is  an  affair  of  feeling  and  will  and  involves  all  the  affective 
and  voluntary  mind,  must  be  made  clear  with  some  detail, 
unless  our  epistemology  is  willing  quite  to  mistake  the 
nature  of  knowledge.  The  feeling  aspects  of  our  psychic 
life  are  in  themselves  just  as  really  varied  and  variously 
colored,  just  as  constantly  present,  as  are  the  intellectual 
momenta.  Were  it  not  for  this  ever  present  and  vital 
experience  of  feeling,  our  sensations,  ideas,  and  thoughts 
would  all  be  thinner  and  paler  than  the  trooping  shadows  of 
the  vaguest  dream,  —  without  interest,  without  value,  with- 
out reality  of  any  kind.  Nor  would  our  trains  of  ideas 
result  in  judgments  apprehending  and  comprehending  the 
changing  qualifications  and  relations  of  the  really  existent; 
truth  would  not  be  seized  upon  and  appropriated  with  warm 
conviction  as  to  its  certitude  and  its  worth. 

Peculiar  forms  of  conscious  experience  there  are  which 
we  seem  compelled  to  recognize  as  the  feelings  belonging 
uniquely  to  cognition.  Reference  has  repeatedly  been  made 
to  the  perfectly  invincible  conviction  that  in  knowledge  we, 
the  subjective,  come  into  some  sort  of  relations  with  an 
object  that  is  not-us,  that  is  trans-subjective.  Experience 
l>y  way  of  cognition  implicates  the  transcendent,  —  of  this,  at 
least  a  naive  and  vague  confidence  seems  to  be  an  essential 
part  of  every  completed  cognitive  process.  But  what  shall 
be  said  of  this  conviction  ?  The  completer  answer  to  this 
inquiry  takes  us  well  into  the  heart  of  the  epistemological 
problem.  It  is,  indeed,  upon  this  feeling  of  conviction  that 
in  the  last  analysis  our  doctrine  of  knowledge  has  largely  to 


THE  PSYCHOLOGICAL  VIEW  125 

rely  for  the  defence  of  its  theoretical  conclusion :  the  facts 
of  consciousness  are  not  themselves  intelligible  without  the 
assumption  of  an  extra-mental  Reality  on  which  conscious- 
ness is  dependent. 

That  the  will  of  the  knower  is  ever  present  and  taking  a 
part,  so  to  speak,  in  every  act  of  knowledge,  is  a  psycho- 
logical truism ;  it  follows  from  the  very  conception  of  knowl- 
edge itself  as  a  complex  form  of  mental  activity.  The 
psychological  doctrine  of  the  influence  of  attention  upon 
perception,  upon  self-consciousness,  and  upon  all  the  grow- 
ing body  of  knowledge  in  which  science  consists,  is  an 
expression  of  this  truth.  But  below  this  familiar  line  of 
thinking  reposes  the  psycho-physical  structure  of  facts  which 
shows  us  that  cognition  itself  is  never  a  purely  sensory, 
but  always  also  a  sensory-motor  affair.  In  that  living 
commerce  with  things  which  requires  action,  and  which 
consists  in  doing  something  to  them,  with  a  will  and  a 
purpose  in  it,  and  in  letting  them  do  something  to  us  which 
restricts  or  thwarts,  or  executes  our  will  and  purpose, 
does  all  human  knowledge  of  things  grow.  This  truth  also 
demands  further  interpretation. 

In  this  connection  the  practical  value  of  a  comprehensive 
view  has  a  bearing  upon  theoretical  truth.  There  are  real 
dangers  to  the  life  of  conduct  and  of  religion  which  come 
from  saying:  "Intellect  is  all;"  or  "Feeling  is  all;"  or 
"Will  is  all."  The  theoretical  truth  on  which  the  practical 
rests  is  this:  Knowledge  is  of  neither  one  alone;  knowledge 
is  of  intellect,  feeling,  and  will.  The  final  witness,  to 
which  we  are  forced  to  make  appeal  for  the  attainment  of 
truth,  and  for  escape  from  error,  is  a  sort  of  complex  mental 
attitude.  This  attitude  involves  feeling  and  will  as  well  as 
intellect.  Emphasizing  the  aspect  of  feeling,  we  may  call  it 
a  kind  of  conviction  of  the  truth  of  the  cognitive  judgment ; 
in  matters  of  contested  evidence,  or  of  practical  importance, 
or  of  grave  intellectual  interest,  the  conviction  may  become 


126  THE  PSYCHOLOGICAL  VIEW 

of  a  highly  emotional  character.  Emphasizing  the  aspect 
of  will,  we  may  refer  to  it  as  a  mental  positing  of  the 
reality  of  the  object,  which  may  become  a  seizure  of,  and  a 
holding  on  to,  this  object  in  the  presence  of  sceptical  temp- 
tations ;  and  which  may  then  appear  as  a  quasi-ethical  activ- 
ity. It  is  just  these  emotional  and  voluntary  aspects  of  the 
total  cognitive  process  that  have  led  men  in  all  ages  to 
regard  their  cognitions  as  answers  to  voices  which  called  to 
them  from  out  of  the  depths  of  Reality,  or  as  intuitions 
and  insights  which  brought  them  into  the  most  interior 
construction  and  processes  of  Reality  (Einleuchtungen  and 
AnscJiauungen  as  well  as  Vorstellungen  and  Begriffe).  Rec- 
ognizing and  submitting  one's  judgment  to  the  voice,  to  the 
light,  thus  gives  a  moral  significance  to  scientific  and  philo- 
sophical investigation  in  general.  Hence  the  picture  drawn 
by  Augustine  of  God  originally  speaking  with  men  as  with 
angels  (ipsa  incommutabili  veritate,  illmtrans  mentes  eorum). 
As  said  Bonaventura,  "Thou  hast  per  se  the  capacity  to 
behold  truth,  if  concupiscences  and  phantasms  do  not  hinder 
thee,  and  like  clouds  interpose  between  thee  and  truth's 
ray. " 

A  psychological  view  of  the  Development  of  Knowledge 
reveals  still  more  clearly  the  nature  of  the  problem  which 
epistemological  philosophy  has  to  examine.  In  the  indi- 
vidual and  in  the  race  the  growth  of  cognition  does  not, 
indeed,  result  from  the  introduction  of  new  powers,  or  from 
the  sudden  appearance  of  distinctly  different  faculties,  in  an 
epoch-making  way.  The  kingdom  of  knowledge,  like  the 
kingdom  of  heaven,  grows  as  does  a  grain  of  mustard  seed. 
Indeed,  if  we  could  only  use  the  word  comprehensively 
enough  we  might  be  tempted  to  declare  that  it  resembles  a 
"  biological  "  development.  It  is  not  given  to  the  observer, 
by  a  microscopic  examination  of  the  mustard  seed,  to  predict 
the  character  of  the  developed  plant.  Nor  can  one  say  that 
all  of  the  latter  is  given  potentially,  or  even  that  its  con- 


THE  PSYCHOLOGICAL   VIEW  127 

ditions  are  present,  in  the  seed.  Neither,  again,  can  one 
discern  the  separate  functional  growths,  and  the  correlation 
of  the  organic  processes,  in  the  very  earliest  growth.  Yet 
the  forces  and  principles  at  work,  and  with  which  the  inves- 
tigator must  reckon,  are  the  same  throughout.  In  no  other 
realm  of  inquiry  is  the  principle  of  continuity  more  strictly 
applicable,  more  obviously  potent,  than  in  the  growth  of 
human  knowledge.  The  detailed  descriptive  history  of  this 
growth  it  belongs  to  psychology  to  give.  The  interpretation 
of  some  of  the  more  important  aspects  and  portions  of  this 
history  is,  indeed,  of  supreme  interest  to  epistemology ;  it 
will  constantly  excite  our  effort  in  the  subsequent  chapters 
of  this  book.  At  present  a  few  words  in  addition  to  what 
has  already  been  brought  to  notice  will  suffice. 

Psychology  can  describe  many  of  the  conditions  under 
which  that  great  "  diremptive  process  "  takes  place,  whose 
accomplishment  is  crowned  by  knowledge  as  a  consciousness 
of  relation  between  subject  and  object,  and  as  an  objective 
consciousness  of  both  subject  and  object  existing  in  this 
relation.  It  can  show  how,  as  the  entire  sensory-motor 
mechanism  runs  more  smoothly  in  the  channels  which  have 
become  marked  out,  certain  groups  of  resulting  experiences 
form  themselves  into  a  Self,  envisaged  or  conceived  of,  and 
certain  others  into  Things,  either  immediately  known  or 
only  inferred.  And  now  the  whole  world  of  experienced 
objects  has  organized  itself  into  two  great  classes  of  cognized 
and  cognizable  realities ;  but  this  world  of  opposed  and  yet 
intercommunicating  entities  had  its  growth,  psychologically, 
from  a  common  root!  Now,  too,  the  world  of  science  begins 
to  reveal  itself  as  under  tuition  purchased  at  the  expense  of 
the  persistent  and  rationally  ordered  experience  of  the  race. 
A  strange  world  this,  of  which  we  are  told  in  terms  of 
highly  preferred  knowledge !  Yet  this  knowledge  claims  to 
be  based  upon  observation  by  the  senses,  —  of  somewhat 
more  than  ordinary  pretensions  to  accuracy  and  painstaking 


128  THE  PSYCHOLOGICAL  VIEW 

care.  It  results  from  much  looking,  hearing,  feeling,  smell- 
ing, tasting,  and  especially  from  much  muscular  intercourse 
with  things ;  and  it  is  called  the  "  world  of  sense, "  in  which 
every  sensible  man  implicitly  believes,  and  to  doubt  which 
is  to  discredit  "  common-sense  "  and  science  alike. 

But  further  acquaintance  with  this  body  of  knowledge,  so 
precious  in  the  eyes  of  those  who  cultivate  it,  and  in  the 
sight  of  us  all,  reveals  its  true  character  in  a  different  way. 
It  is  rather  a  world  of  ideas  and  of  thoughts.  It  makes  the 
most  enormous  demands  upon  thinking  faculty  to  carry  the 
mind  through  tortuous  and  complicated  processes  of  ratioci- 
nation, where  symbols  and  words  that  surely  have  no  real 
correlates  are  the  necessary  scaffolding  for  every  step.  It 
challenges  phantasy  far  more  severely  and  peremptorily  than 
any  poet  or  artist  has  ever  done.  Without  doubt,  imagina- 
tion breaks  quite  down  in  its  effort  to  conceive  of  forces  that 
are  stored  and  do  not  act  (or  energies  of  position),  of  atoms 
that  have  no  color  or  shape,  of  ether  that  is  limitless  in 
tenacity  and  infinitely  tenuous  and  without  weight,  etc. 
The  whole  structure  of  this  world  is  underlain  and  inter- 
penetrated with  hypothetical  entities,  causes,  transactions, 
etc.,  which  are  introduced  in  the  interest  of  observed  facts, 
but  which  can  never  themselves  become  actual  objects  of 
observation.  Yet  if  we  reject  it  as  merely  hypothetical  and 
imaginary,  or  as  the  product  of  purely  abstract  thinking  —  a 
system  of  mental  images  and  conceptions  of  most  extraordi- 
nary and  non-sensible  kind  —  we  confine  human  knowledge 
within  undesirably  narrow  limitations.  And,  indeed,  these 
activities  of  imagination  and  thought,  with  their  underlying 
postulates,  and  their  inciting  and  supporting  play  of  the 
feeling  that  it  is  so,  and  of  the  will  to  have  it  so,  are  essen- 
tially the  same  as  those  employed  in  all  the  knowledge  of 
our  daily  life.  If  science  cannot  correct  common-sense  by 
denying  to  it  the  exercise  of  all  its  dearest  and  most  impor- 
tant rights,  common-sense  cannot  distrust  science  without 


THE  PSYCHOLOGICAL  VIEW  129 

surrendering  the  rationality  of  all  that  is  of  practical  inter- 
est to  itself.  For  cognition,  by  the  very  principles  of  its 
growth,  tends  more  and  more  to  the  solidarity  and  yet  per- 
petual flux  of  a  system  of  living  organisms.  Nor  can  science 
and  common -sense  safely  or  correctly  draw  the  line  that 
shall  shut  philosophy  out  of  this  growing  body  of  human 
knowledge. 


CHAPTER  V 

THINKING  AND  KNOWING 

/TAHAT  knowledge  cannot  be  gained  without  more  or  less  of 
J-  correct  and  prolonged  thinking  is  a  practical  maxim 
which  no  one  would  be  found  to  dispute.  But  that  there  is 
much  knowledge  which  does  not  come  by  mere  thinking  is  a 
maxim  scarcely  more  to  be  held  in  doubt.  Thinking  is, 
then,  universally  recognized  as  an  important  and  even  neces- 
sary part  of  knowing;  but  it  is  not  the  whole  of  knowing. 
Or,  in  other  words,  one  must  make  use  of  one's  faculties  of 
thought  as  an  indispensable  means  to  cognition;  but  there 
are  other  means  which  must  also  be  employed,  since  it  is 
not  by  thought  alone  that  the  human  mind  attains  cognition. 
This  manner  of  speech  is  indicative  of  that  trustworthy 
psychological  instinct  and  its  resulting  body  of  opinion 
which  characterizes  human  nature.  And  thus,  in  the  elabo- 
ration of  a  philosophical  theory  of  knowledge  which  shall  be 
true  to  the  facts  of  life,  it  is  matter  of  the  first  importance 
to  compare  thought  and  cognition,  and  to  recognize  both 
their  points  of  resemblance  and  their  points  of  difference. 
A  sound  epistemological  doctrine  must  make  clear  how 
much  and  what  of  the  cognitive  process  consists  in  that 
movement  of  the  intellect  which  we  call  thinking;  and  how 
it  is  that  truth,  with  its  assured  grasp  upon  the  existence 
and  relations  of  the  real  —  the  trans-subjective  —  world,  is 
thus  made  the  possession  of  the  subject,  in  the  form  of  states 
of  his  own  consciousness. 

If  now  the  popular  opinion,  as  well  as  that  of  the  majority 
of  writers   on  logic,   be  taken  in  answer  to  the  question, 


THINKING  AND  KNOWING  131 

What  besides  clear,  patient,  and  correct  thinking  is  neces- 
sary to  a  knowledge  of  truth  ?  there  is  discoverable  an  almost 
complete  agreement.  It  is  observation  —  patient,  exact,  and 
intelligent  —  that  lays  the  basis,  so  to  speak,  for  the  struc- 
ture of  truth  which  thinking  rears.  And,  moreover,  since 
every  thinker  is  liable  to  have  his  thoughts  wander,  or 
become  too  much  mixed  up  with  imaginings,  and  since 
there  is  danger  from  too  "  pure  "  or  "  abstract "  thoughts,  the 
results  of  thinking  must  be  constantly  compared  with  renewed 
and  improved  observations  of  fact.  It  is  thus  by  using 
observation  to  start  the  trains  of  thinking,  which  now  —  once 
started  —  carry  us  into  a  wider  and  more  airy  domain,  where, 
however,  our  conceptions  of  things  must  be  tested  with  ever 
open  eyes  and  freshened  memories  of  our  actual  visions,  that 
we  gain  more  and  more  of  assured  knowledge.  Indeed, 
under  the  influence  of  a  natural  reaction  against  former 
magnificent  attempts  to  handle  the  truths  of  the  real  world 
as  problems  for  thought  only,  modern  science  has  often  no 
little  contempt  to  throw  upon  "abstractions"  as  compared 
with  that  cognition  of  facts  which  is  gained  by  observation. 
Some  of  its  devotees  are  even  tempted  to  forget  that  mere 
observation,  if  such  a  thing  indeed  were  possible,  would  no 
more  create  science  than  mere  thinking. 

The  more  carefully  analytic  studies  of  modern  psychology 
prove  that,  in  fact,  thinking  and  cognition  are,  so  to  speak, 
per  se  inseparable.  They  show  that  without  thinking  no 
cognition  whatever  is  possible.  This  is  a  truth  of  which  no 
one  has  ever  been  more  firmly  persuaded  than  was  Kant; 
and  it  is  to  be  hoped  that  no  one  will  ever  attempt  to  elabo- 
rate it  more  fully  than  he  did.  But  what  is  chiefly  needed 
at  the  present  time  is  to  learn  from  modern  psychology,  and 
to  expand  and  teach  in  an  improved  epistemology,  the  fuller 
doctrine  of  the  relations  between  the  two.  Inj^revious  wucks 
£n  logic,  and  even  in  not  ajfiw  of  the  most, important  phila- 
sophical  treatises,  the  distil n fit irm  HPJ-.WPPTI.  knn\y]pdge  by  ob- 


132  THINKING  AND  KNOWING 

n  and  knowledge  by  thinking  has  bejm_jJ£fa£tively 


is  called  "  intuitive  "or  •  "  immediate  "  knowledge.  and  the 
Iatter~"-ttrt^T3CaI3LQ^~^nediate  ?)  or  "Abstract  "  knowledge. 
And  now  the  logician  thinks  it  right  to  hold  that  when  he 
has  given  an  account  of  the  forms  which  characterize  the 
mental  life  of  thought,  he  has  discharged  his  entire  duty  as 
a  student  of  mental  life.  For  is  not  logic  &  formal  affair, 
-^•a  presentation  (usually  most  dry  and  lifeless),  with  dread- 
ful array  of  strange  symbols,  of  the  mere  forms  of  thinking 
faculty  as  it  conceives,  judges,  and  reasons  from  grounds  to 
consequences  ?  To  the  psychologist  belongs,  in  sooth  !  the 
explication  and  the  vindication  of  so-called  intuitive  or 
immediate  knowledge.  How,  and  on  what  terms  of  self- 
conscious  estimate  of  my  own  cognitive  faculty,  and  in 
the  exercise  of  what  dark  and  mysterious  rights,  do  I  stand 
before  any  natural  object  —  a  tree,  a  stone,  a  human  face  — 
and  affirm:  "IJtnow^jjou^  for  surej  that  you  are,  that  you 
really  are  ;  and  what  you  are  in  your  actual  structure  and 
modes  of  behavior  "  ?  This  is  a  complex  and  most  vexing 
question  which  logic  is  glad  enough  to  turn  over  to  psy- 
chology. And  yetv  it  is  not  a  question  which  _cjtn  be 
answered,  or  even  have  its  import  faithfully  recognized, 
without  taking  into  account  the  application  of  the  laws  of 
thought  in  all  so-called  immediate  cognition  of  reality. 

There  is  little  reason  for  wonder,  then,  when  psychology 
—  especially  of  that  "new"  type  which  is  prone  to  abjure 
metaphysics  and  epistemology  as  unworthy  members  of  its 
own  family,  and  to  consort  rather  with  biology  and  physi- 
ology as  with  persons  of  its  nearer  kinship  —  refuses  to  take 
this  question  off  the  hands  of  its  ancient  partner  in  intel- 
lectual concerns,  the  stately  "scientist"  (of  the  high-and- 
dry  a  priori  order)  called  logic.  For  does  not  psychology 
aim  to  become  the  exact  science  of  mental  phenomena,  of 
"  states  of  consciousness,  as  such  "  ?  But  at  this  point  other 


THINKING  AND  KNOWING  133 

questions  arise.  Is  not  my  cognition  of  that  thing  over 
there  —  that  tree,  or  stone,  or  Human  face  — ^a_jnental  phe- 
nomenon, a  state  of  my  consciousness-?  And  if  it  is  to  be 
describecflmd  explained  at  all  by  any  form  of  human 
science,  does  not  the  duty  of  description  and  explanation 
fall  upon  that  science  which  defines  itself  as  having  a  right 
to  the  sphere  of  mental  phenomena  in  general,  of  all  con- 
scious states  ?  If,  further,  cognition  is  to  be  described  and 
explained  by  psychology  at  all,  should  it  not  be  scientifically 
handled  in  its  entirety,  without  mutilation  or  suppression  of 
anything  which  rightly  belongs  to  its  mental  constitution  ? 
Further,  is  it  not  clear  that  objective  reference,  warmed  with 
the  unchanging  conviction  of  the  trans-subjective  and  the 
extra-mental,  is  something  inseparable  from  the  very  psychic 
being  of  cognition  ?  How,  then,  can  psychology  shirk  the 
task  of  an  analytic  that  goes  to  the  very  core  of  cognitive 
consciousness  ?  But  in  vain  is  a  piteous  pleading  for  response 
to  these  questions  set  up  before  the  bar  of  the  current  scien- 
tific psychology.  Such  questions  are  by  her  chief  doctors  of 
laws  nowadays  handed  over  to  epistemology.  Meantime 
they  are  themselves  spending  their  "labor  for  that  which 
satisfieth  not." 

At  this  point,  then,  we  are  again  thrown  back  upon  Kant 
and  upon  his  followers  in  the  same  line  of  critical  inquiry. 
We  find  this  master  of  analytic  constantly  insisting  upon  the 
truth  that  knowledge  is  impossible  without  thought;  mere 
sensation-content,  held  up  in  consciousness  as  a  picture  by 
constructive  imagination,  does  not  as  yet  amount  to  knowl- 
edge. For  if  "  thoughts  without  contents  are  empty,  intui- 
tions without  concepts  are  blind."  But  Kant,  in  the 
working  out  of  his  theory  of  the  relations  between  "empty 
thoughts"  and  "blind  intuitions,"  often  so  sets  intuitions 
and  thoughts  in  contrast  as  to  seem  to  make  them  functions 
and  products  of  diverse  powers  of  the  soul.  And  —  a  much 
more  serious  deficiency  which  finally  becomes  a  source  of 


134  THINKING  AND  KNOWING 

disastrous  error  —  he  devotes  his  theory  of  knowledge  wholly 
to  its  a  priori,  formal  side.  Such  a  restriction  of  our 
critique  might,  indeed,  be  allowed  in  the  interests  of  nar- 
rowing the  problem,  which  is,  as  Kant  attempts  to  isolate 
and  discuss  it,  sufficiently  comprehensive  and  profound. 
But  the  analysis  of  form,  while  it  may  for  a  time  seem  to 
expose  and  to  account  for  the  peculiar  nature  of  thought, 
does  not  for  one  single  moment  even  seem  to  do  the  same 
thing  for  cognition.  For  when,  in  the  evolution  of  mental 
life,  we  come  to  knowledge,  it  is_the  origin,  nature,  J*nd 
validating  of  the  matter-of-fact  content  which,  interests  an<L, 
-concerns  ua  most.  How~doelT  sensibility  originallycome  to 
be  impressed  at  alT?  and  how  does  it  come  to  be  impressed 
as  it  actually  is  impressed,  beyond  the  ability  of  phantasy 
and  will  and  thought  wholly  to  control  the  impression  ? 
Whence  comes,  and  what  is  the  value  of,  that  belief  in  an 
envisaged  reality  which  is  essential  to  the  very  existence 
of  every  act  of  intuitive  knowledge  ?  In  answer  to  these 
and  other  similar  inquiries,  Kant  can  only  repeat  his  doc- 
trine of  the  a  priori  forms  of  the_twodistinct  kinds  of 
jc^)gnjJioftr-Y  intmtimia_^and  concepts ;  excejjt_a£L  heevery- 
where1__at_times,  by  sundry'Trrnts'lmd  nods  and  dumb  but 
meaningful  gesticulatmn^Iindtggte^He3iesc^e~lirthe  dark 
background  ofj ajjiv^terirrtra-JK^j^m^ 

The  creation  of  a  fixed  gulf  between  kinds  of  knowledge, 
and  the  relegation,  for  its  sources  and  its  validity,  of  one 
kind  to  an  unanalyzable  mystery,  and  of  the  other  to  a 
system  of  merely  formal  rules,  with  the  accompanying  sepa- 
ration of  the  faculties  involved  in  all  cognitive  activity,  and 
a  total  disregard  of  the  necessary  implicates  of  every  cogni- 
tion, have  been  the  Trpwrov  i/reOSo<?  and  the  chief  mischief- 
maker  in  epistemological  theories  since  Kant.  Fichte's 
science  of  knowledge  aimed  to  attain  a  systematic  cognition 
of  the  really  existent  by  a  series  of  states  of  self-envisage- 
ment.  The  processes  of  self-consciousness  were  here  thought 


THINKING  AND  KNOWING  135 

out  into  the  form  of  a  system  of  concepts,  and  then  identified 
off-hand  with  the  sum-total  of  Reality.  With  Schelling 
"the  true  direction"  of  cognition  is  not  a  movement  along 
the  line  of  self-consciousness  alone.  "We  can  go,"  says 
he,  "from  nature  to  ourselves,  or  from  ourselves  to  nature, 
but  the  true  direction  for  him  to  whom  knowledge  is  of 
more  account  than  all  else,  is  that  which  nature  herself 
adopts."1  Moving  in  this  direction  he  would  give  to  the 
place  which  thought  reaches  the  characteristics  of  a  stand- 
point for  intuition.  "For  there  dwells  in  us  all  a  secret, 
wonderful  faculty,  by  virtue  of  which  we  can  withdraw  from 
the  mutations  of  time  into  our  innermost  disrobed  selves, 
and  there  behold  the  eternal  under  the  form  of  immutability ; 
such  vision  is  our  innermost  and  peculiar  experience,  on 
which  alone  depends  all  that  we  know  and  believe  of  a 
supra-sensible  world."  Thus  from  Schelling's  faculty  of 
"  intellectual  intuition "  are  both  intuition  and  thought 
really  dropped  out;  and  with  them  the  subject  and  the 
object  vanish  together  from  the  field  of  the  really  existent 
as  necessary  "moments"  in  the  operation  of  cognitive 
faculty.  Knowledge  is  once  more  explained  by  being 
destroyed. 

Hegel  showed  a  saner  mind  in  his  appreciation  of  the 
relations  between  thinking  and  knowing,  and  between  know- 
ing and  being.  His  philosophy  has  been  called  "  a  critical 
transformation  and  development  of  Schelling's  System  of 
Identity."  His  aim,  as  defined  by  himself,  was  (1)  "to  ele- 
vate consciousness  to  the  standpoint  of  absolute  knowledge;" 
and  (2)  "to  develop  systematically  the  entire  contents  of 
this  knowledge  by  the  dialectical  method."  In  accomplish- 
ing this  aim,  an  overestimate  is  placed  upon  the  syste- 
matic arrangement  of  the  mere  forms  of  thinking;  absolute 
knowledge  becomesjso  elevated  above  the  standpoint  of  the 

1  From  the  close  of  an  article  by  Schelling  himself  in  the  first  volume  of  the 
"  Zeitschrift  fur  speculative  Physik." 


136  THINKING  AND  KNOWING 

ordinary  consciousness  that  it  cannot  be  attained  or  even 
descried  by  those  who  maintain  this  standpoint;  and  the 
critical  examination  of  the  import  and  value  of  the  funda- 
mental assumption,  that  the  forms  of  thought  are  the  forms 
of  reality,  is  stopped  short  almost  before  it  is  fairly  begun. 
Hence,  in  part,  it  is  that  men  devoted  to  the  enlargement  of 
the  field  of  knowledge  as  covered  by  the  concrete  sciences  of 
nature  have,  often  in  extreme  ignorance  of  his  real  position, 
treated  Hegel  so  contemptuously.  Nor  is  it  very  strange 
that  such  investigators  feel  more  sympathy  with  the  position 
of  the  most  contemptuous  of  Hegel's  critics  in  the  common 
field  of  philosophy,  — namely,  Schopenhauer.  " Perception," 
says  the  latter,  "  isjipjLJ2nJj_thes0Mrce  ofaJlJtRowTedge,  but 

is  thgjonly  unconditionally 

-f>f  the  nnmp, For  it  alone 

imparts  insight  properly  so-called,  it  alone  is  actually  assimi- 
lated by  man,  passes  into  his  nature,  and  can  with  full 
reason  be  called  his;  while  the  conceptions  merely  cling  to 
him. "  They  "  thus  afford  the  real  content  of  all  our  thought, 
and  whenever  they  are "Wanting  we  havenot  had  conceptions 
but  mere  words  in  our  heads."  Thought,  consisting  in  com- 
paring conceptions,  gives  us  no  really  new  knowledge.  "On 
the  other  hand,  to  perceive,  to  allow  the  things  themselves 
to  speak  to  us,  to  apprehend  new  relations  of  them,  and  then 
to  take  up  and  deposit  all  this  in  conceptions,  in  order  to 
possess  it  with  certainty,  —  that  gives  new  knowledge. " 

To  all  such  one-sided  views  of  the  nature  of  knowledge,  its 
growth,  and  the  way,  through  it,  that  we  come  at  reality,  so 
to  speak,  it  is  the  completer  understanding  of  the  primary 
facts  of  knowledge,  especially  as  they  evince  the  similarities 
and  differences  between  thinking  and  knowing,  which  affords 
the  only  satisfactory  critical  standpoint.  Cognition  is  one 
living  process  throughout;  and  valuable  as  a  distinction  of 
its  stages  and  kinds  and  points  of  departure  may  be,  there 
is  one  essential  body  of  characteristics  to  be  recognized  as 


THINKING  AND  KNOWING  137 

everywhere  present.  Intuitive  knowledge  does  not  come  at 
first,  or  grow,  without  thinking;  nor  is  thinking  that  is 
not  in  some  sort  intuitive,  if  such  a  thing  were  at  all  pos- 
sible, the  avenue  to  more  of  mediate  and  indirect  knowledge. 
The  first  act  of  cognition  achieved  by  the  infant  mind  is  a 
triumph  of  thinking  faculty.  The  last  and  highest  achieve- 
ment of  knowledge  gained  by  the  highly  trained  and  richly 
stored  reflective  mind  is  also  a  feeling-full  and  voluntary 
envisagement  of  reality.  Cognition  purified  of  thought  is 
deprived  of  a  factor  essential  to  cognition.  Pure  thinking 
is  never  so  abstracted  from  successive  steps  of  intuitive 
commerce  with  the  real  as  to  be  purely  thinking;  and  if  it 
could  be  thus  abstracted,  it  could  not  become  the  beginning, 
the  means,  or  the  end  of  a  cognitive  process.  The  very 
prevalence,  however,  of  this  principle  of  continuity,  as 
applied  to  all  the  growth  of  knowledge  in  and  through 
thought,  makes  it  the  more  necessary  that  we  should  under- 
stand the  resemblances  and  the  differences  of  these  two  atti- 
tudes of  Mind  toward  Reality. 

Let  us,  then,  compare  that  mental  movement  or  form  of 
psychic  life  which  is  called  "thought"  with  our  previous 
description  of  the  nature  and  growth  of  knowledge.  What 
is  it  to  think  ?  To  answer  with  Mr.  Spencer  and  others  as 
though  thinking  were  mere  generalizing  under  the  principle 
of  comparison  is  to  fail  of  fully  describing  what  men  ordi- 
narily experience  when  they  think,  and  think  concretely, 
and  to  some  definite  purpose.  With  us  all,  when  we  make 
earnest  with  our  thoughts,  the  stream  of  consciousness 
becomes  an  active  conscious  relating  of  otherwise—Separate 
items  ofcognition.  It^s_subjective ^aji^^nseioji^  JLE^ 
cess;  but  a  process  in  consciousness  which  is  betfelrctescribed 
as  distinctively  not  U~T7srss1ve^suffering/  of  something,  but  a 
doing  of  something  with  our  own  ideas.  Thinking  is, 
ing;  jedes  Denken  ein  Wollen,  as  Wundt-^n}mirab!y  says.1 

1  System  der  Philosophic,  p.  42. 


138  THINKING  AND  KNOWING 

Thought  is  experienced  as  a  transaction  produced  by  ourselves. 
So  that,  although  it  is  not  to  be  described  as  willing  per  se, 
and  can  neither  be  always  identified  with  the  higher  forms 
of  self-conscious  choice  nor  —  which  is  yet  more  certain  — 
<x.  usually  relegated  to  the  lower  forms  of  so-called  uni motived 


\volition,  it  appears  as  a  quasi-voluntary  response  to  a 
^  demand.  Often  one's  thinking  is  a  highly  develop 
^  singularly  pronouncedand  self-conscious  form  of  willing. 
When  I  am  thinking,  —  always  about  this  or  that,  — ^and  in 
proportion  as  I  am^TRT^-di^eaniing-orJ^fctitig-  my  ideas  run 
away  with  me,  I  am  "Jo^EEglupImjrjnind. "  I,  the  mind, 
am  making  up  myself,  —  although  in  accordance,  as  further 
investigation  shows  me,  with  internal  necessities  called 
"laws  of  the  mind,"  and  more  obviously  in  attempted 
accordance  with  the  actual  ^relations  and  forms  of  the 
behavior  of  things.  Thus  men  tell  each  other  what  /think, 
about  this  or  that;  and  they  ask  each  other:  "What  do  you 
think  ?  "  —  YOU,  as  a  self-active,  self-directing  subject  of  the 
conscious  process  called  your  thoughts. 

Yet    again,    all    cognition,    wjiich^  -comes by   thinking, 

involves  some  seeking,  striving  after,  actual  pursuing  of  the 
truthT^nd  this  necessarily  implies  willing  as  a  "  moment " 
in  the  thinking  process.  NQ-manJj3  likely  to  know  the  trnfh 
jes  not  will  to  know  it,  who  actively  restrains,  or  pas- 
sively refraimrKimself  from  willing.  As  we  think,  we  pur- 
pose to  apprehend  and  comprehend,  to  seize  hold  of  and 
grasp  around  the  object  about  which  we  are  thinking.  And 
although,  of  course,  language  here  is  pregnant  with  figures 
of  speech,  there  are  few  matters  of  common  experience 
where  figures  of  speech  are  more  pregnant  with  truth  than 
are  those  here  employed. 

Thinking,  too,  is  a  more  complex  form  of  psychic  move- 
ment or  activity  than  is  mental  representation,  —  meaning  by 
the  latter  the  merely  passive  flow  of  unchecked  and  relatively 
purposeless  trains  of  associated  ideas.  It  is  upon  the  basis 


THINKING  AND  KNOWING  139 

of  this  lower  form  of  mental  representation  that  thinking, 
properly  so-called,  reposes.  In  saying  this,  we  are  probably 
separating  in  thought  what  never  occurs  wholly  separate  in 
the  actual  life  of  the  mind.  In  few,  indeed,  of  one's  states 
of  reverie  and  of  fancy-play,  even  in  dreams,  does  one  seem 
to  one's  self  wholly  to  refrain  from  taking  any  part  in  the 
character  and  succession  of  the  ideas  which  appear  in  con- 
sciousness. Rarely  is  the  Ego  a  mere  passive  spectator  of 
the  drama  enacted  by  the  faculty  of  ideation.  Even  when 
the  ideas  get  away  from  me,  as  it  were,  and  disport  them- 
selves as  becomes  the  ideas  of  an  animal  or  of  a  madman,  I 
am  still  right  there,  ready  to  prompt  or  to  repress  them,  and 
not  wholly  theirs  instead  of  their  being  at  least  partly 
mine.  Thus,  too,  in  accordance  with  the  active  character- 
istic of  all  thinking  do  we  distinguish  it  as  a  more  complex 
process  than  mere  association  of  ideas,  —  endowed,  as  it 
were,  with  a  higher  style  of  mentality.  Ideation  appears 
as  a  process  given  to  consciousness ;  thinking  is  more  fully 
self-conscious  and  self-induced,  selective  and  preferential. 
From  this  point  of  view  it  has  even  been  argued l  that  only 
free  wills  can  truly  think,  not  to  say  think  truly.  For  the 
thinking  subject  must  have  the  power  to  grasp  and  hold  the 
thought-element  (the  "  moment "  which  may  be  used  to  enter 
into  the  judgment)  against  the  destructive  influence  of  the 
flux  of  images  mechanically  determined ;  must  choose  a  com- 
panion for  comparison  or  contrast  with  it,  and  so  judge  what 
is  true  in  reality  as  distinguished  from  what  is  passively 
determined  in  the  mental  train. 

In  connection  with  such  experiences  as  illustrate  the  dis- 
tinctions already  made,  we  become  aware  of  the  peculiar- 
strain  and  tone  of  attention  which  accompanies  the  thinking 
process.  When  one  is  not  thinking  somewhat  intently,  or 
not  definitively  and  determinately  thinking  at  all,  one  is 

1  Compare  Kanlich,  "  Ueber  die  Moglichkeit,  das  Ziel,  und  die  Grenzen  des 
Wissens,"  pp.  29  £. 


140  THINKING  AND  KNOWING 

like  a  spectator  of  a  light  drama,  or  it  may  be  of  a  comedy. 
One  attends  with  interest,  indeed,  but  with  the  interest 
rather  of  those  who  will  have  others  do  the  work  or  conduct 
the  play,  while  they  amuse  themselves  by  looking  on.  But 
let  any  of  the  actors  (the  ideas)  challenge  and  secure  another 
kind  of  interest;  and  then  the  whole  strain  and  tone  of 
attention  changes,  as  one  begins  to  think  more  reflectively 
and  to  conclude  about  what  is  going  on.  For  thinking  is 
somewhat  of  business,  is  no  mere  play,  for  the  mind ;  and 
business  demands  attention,  directed  to  the  accomplishment 
of  a  clearly  conceived  end.  Hence  the  teleology  of  thinking 
as  it  enters  into  the  final  purposes  of  cognition,  and  brings 
the  man  of  thought  and  the  man  of  action  into  the  unity  of 
one  life.  With  this  change  in  the  character  of  the  attention, 
demanded  and  given,  there  goes  a  change  in  the  feelings, 
both  such  as  have  reference  to  self  and  such  as  have  refer- 
ence to  things.  For  the  total  affective  accompaniment  of 
thinking  as  a  necessary  process  to  the  completed  act  of  cog- 
nition is  of  a  peculiar,  complex  kind.  I  am  more  self- 
conscious  in  thinking,  more  keenly  alive  and  sensitive  to 
every  subjective  change  as  a  possible  clue  to  the  knowledge 
I  seek,  or  as  a  possible  temptation  or  solicitation  into  some 
path  of  error.  I  care  more  about  myself  when  I,  as  subject, 
make  me,  as  object,  the  terminal  of  my  train  of  thought. 
But  if  I,  as  subject,  make  some  thing  or  relation  between 
things,  the  object  of  my  thinking,  the  same  characteristic 
wakefulness  aud  feeling-full  attention  belongs  to  the  conscious 
processes  evoked. 

Let  all  this  be  considered,  as  illustrated  in  men's  daily 
experiences,  —  remembering  that  the  thinking  of  which  we 
are  discoursing  is  not  that  pale  and  ghostly  process  of  linking 
together  so-called  concepts  by  highly  abstract  symbols  which 
is  scholastically  held  to  represent  the  formal  laws  of  thought. 
The  rather  must  the  philosophical  theory  of  knowledge 
primarily  deal  with  the  blood-red  and  sinewy  thought  of  the 


THINKING  AND  KNOWING  141 

street,  the  mart,  the  ordinary  waking  lii'e  of  the  multitude 
of  men.  Actual  thinking,  as  distinguished  from  the  linking 
of  symbols  and  concepts  together  in  books  on  logic,  seldom 
for  a  moment  relaxes  its  firm  clutch  upon  reality,  and  its 
invincible  conviction  that  the  self-conscious  thinker  is 
adjusting  his  own  mental  attitudes,  with  a  prompt  sequence 
in  adjustment  of  the  appropriate  actions,  to  the  real  proper- 
ties and  actual  relations  of  selves  and  of  things.  But  this 
is  the  kind  of  thinking  that  enters  into  every  primary  act  of 
knowledge,  of  every  cognition  which,  for  certitude  and  so- 
called  immediacy  or  "  intuitive  "  characteristics,  belongs  to 
the  first  rank. 

The  most  special  characterization  of  thinking  as  a  factor 
of  all  cognition  is  reached,  however,  only  when  it  is  affirmed 
that  all  thinking  is  relating  activity.  From  one  standpoint, 
from  which  it  is  always  proper  to  regard  consciousness, 

SJs  'V—^^ 

tbojight__is--a  recognitJQii_of  relations  determined  by  jthe_ 
action  of  objects  as  they  appear  to  the  thinking  mind.  This 
is  the  so-called  common-sense,  realistic  way  of  stating  the 
facts.  What  is  the  metaphysical  truth  in  such  expressions  ? 
It  is  a  fact  of  experience  which  may  not  be  questioned,  that 
one  "feels  at  liberty"  to  imagine  various  sorts  of  relations, 
between  things  and  their  qualities,  between  things  and 
minds,  and  between  things  and  things,  as  one  wi7Zs  and 
without  regard  to  the  actuality  of  these  relations.  But  if 
one  intends  to  think,  —  meaning  by  this  something  more 
than  mere  play  of  imagination,  —  one  is  under  compulsion 
to  follow,  either  in  actual  observation  or  in  intent,  the 
courses  marked  out  by  reality.  In  recognition  of  this  pas- 
sive and  objectively  determined  aspect  of  the  relating  func- 
tion in  thought,  the  pious  enthusiast  may  exclaim:  "I  think 
thy  thoughts  after  Thee,  0  God!"  when  he  has  adjusted  his 
own  mental  representations  to  the  relations  of  the  external 
world.  So  also  the  "scientist"  holds  himself  obligated  to 
think  natural  objects  as  they  actually  are  related  to  each 


142  THINKING  AND  KNOWING 

other  in  Nature  herself.  And  the  plain  man  considers  his 
fellow  to  have  lost  the  most  trustworthy  possession  of  his 
common-sense,  if  he  habitually  mistakes  imagination  for 
thought  as  to  the  qualities  and  the  transactions  of  things. 
But  the  other  and  opposite  point  of  view  must  not  be  lost 
out  of  sight.  For  if  to  think  is  active  consciousness,  and 
its  peculiar  characteristic  is  a  sort  of  "getting-at "  relations, 
then  it  is  right  to  declare  that  thinking  is  relating  activity. 
And,  indeed,  this  goes  to  the  very  heart  of  the  question. 
We  cannot,  indeed,  accept  the  often  repeated  dictum  of  Lotze 
—  "  To  be  is  to  be  related  "  —  as  a  satisfactory  metaphysical 
principle.  But  that  no  thing  is  known,  or  can  be  known,  as 
^ut_of__rjeiation.  j)r  without  being  in  relation,  is  an-_im- 
€kmht£d  epistemological  facE For  the  declaration  that"  to 
TcriQw  is  tn  relate  "  Jg  n.  valj^vfrvnly  apartial,  description 
of  knowledge.  But  that  activityoF~~the  mirKPwhich  ^per- 
forms  the  act  of  relating  is  precisely  what  is  meant  by 
thinking,  in  respect  of  its  most  fundamental  and  universal 
characteristic. 

The  details  implied  in  affirming  that  all  thinking  is  relat- 
ing activity,  must  be  referred  back  to  descriptive  psychology 
to  tell.  From  it  we  learn  that  relating  is  not  merely  com- 


parison,— aot — merely  flssjjmjjatton^  or  differentiation.  It 
serves  our  purpose  —  which,  it  must  not  be  forgotten,  is  to 
show  how  thinking  enters  into  all  cognition  without  being 
the  whole  of  any  complete  cognitive  act  —  simply  to  notice 
that  thinking,  as  relating  activity  or  the  conscious  and  pur- 
poseful bringing  of  our  ideas  into  relations  which  are 
believed  to  be  conformable  to  the  actual  relations  of  the 
extra-mentally  existent  world,  culminates  in  judgment. 
Thinking  involves  discrimination;  indeed,  the  primary 
phase  of  the  so-called  faculty  of  thought  may  best  be  spoken 
of  as  "discriminating  consciousness."1  So,  too,  in  its 
higher  forms  of  manifestation  thinking  is  analyzing  activity; 

1  See  Psychology,  Descriptive  and  Explanatory,  chap.  xiv. 


THINKING  AND  KNOWING  143 

and  without  such  analyzing  activity,  true  judgment  (at  least, 
in  the  form  in  which  judgment  enters  into  a  finished  act  of 
apperceptive  consciousness)  cannot  be  formed.  For  every 
true  judgment  implies  a  consciously  recognized  duality  — 
albeit  as  existent,  combined  in  the  unity  of  the  judgment 
itself.  But  it  is  judgment  as  synthetic,  essentially  so,  in 
which  all  thinking  processes  culminate,  and  which  becomes 
an  essential  factor  in  every  primary  act  of  cognition. 

Only,  then,  as  we  understand  the  actual,  concretejudgments 
of  men,  what  they  consciously  are  andwbTaT  they  signify, 
can~v^eaiiders'tand  tlie~relations__of jthinking  an^~fcHovving'; 
and  thus,  so  far  forth,  frame  a  theorypf  knowledge  consistent 
with  the  facts  of  experience.  Now  theTactual  concrete~rfcTo: 
-judging  is  ^itself  a  process  in  consciousness.  Strictly  speak- 
ing, it  is  not  so  much  a  mental  seizure  and  permanent  hold- 
ing of  some  island  in  the  flowing  stream  of  conscious  life  as 
it  is  a  determinate  direction  in  the  flow  of  the  stream  itself. 
When,  therefore,  judgment  is  spoken  of  as  a  "  synthesis,"  it  is 
well  not  to  be  deceived  by  the  figure  of  speech.  In  no  judg- 
ment, not  even  in  affirming  the  simplest  identity  of  a  mathe- 
matical or  logical  sort  (X=  Y;  or,  All  A  is  J?)^_does  the 
mind  stand  still  while  it  places  the~ideas^one  upon  top  of 
the  other,  or  contemplates  them  lying  side  by  side.  In  affirm- 
ing X=  X,  I  distinguish  the  X  which  is  in  the  place  of  the 
subject  from  the  X  which  is  in  the  place  of  the  predicate ; 
and,  then,  I  posit  a  certain  relation  by  mentally  constituting 

a  synthesis  of  the  two.     This  I  musjuio.  if  I  recognize  the 

_,•  *  t . • — 

^relation  existing  between   the  terms  of  the  judgment;   that 


is,  if  I  malEe  a  true  judgment  as  the  terminal,  so  to  speak, 
of  an  act  of  real  cognition.  • .  But  here  two  things  of  common 

w 

experience  must  be  borne  in  mjnd^JLmay  have_£omfi_aQrt~of 
a  mentalpresentment  oftermswhich  might  pos^iblyjbejorjned 
into^TJcni^ient,  or~even~~of  these  "terms  as  somehow  set 
objectively  in THe^elations  appropriate  to  a  possible  judg- 
ment, withoTTtfeither  actually  recognizing  them  as  terms  of 


144 


THINKING  AND  KNOWING 


a  judgment  or  synthesizing  them  as  an  actual  judgment  of 
my  own.  I  may  see  X=  X,  and  make  use  of  this  percept  as 
a  kind  of  momentary  stepping-stone  in  an  argument,  with- 
out judging  X  really  to  be  =  X.  It  is  not  in  mathematics 


alone_thatJ3a£a-Conduct  complicated  trains  of  Ideation^jvith 
more  m-lpsaj^nnf-.rnl  hy  npi,iy^_jjTjnjdno^ and  yet  only  occa- 
sionally  perforrnjbhe  mentaJ^aiiL-QLJudgment,  in  the  more 

Moreover,  in  considering  the 
to  knowing,  it   isalways  essential   to 

Inquire  carefully  what  it  is  that  is  reallyjudged!  IsiFthat 
X  is  equal  to  -3T;  or  only  that  /  am  proceeding  along  the 
right  path  toward  the  solution  of  my  problem  ?  The  life  of 
our  daily  activitiegjis_j:ull  of  problems  for_consciousness  to 

more  does  the  ^^ni.ip.nLaolutinn  jrTmnny  of 

these  problems  take  place  as  the  result  of  past  acquirements 
and  growths  of  cognition,  with  felatTvely Tittle  actual  judg- 
ment pxgrftjaedjjj^tfhfi  prfickn  mnnmnl-ftf--Hw»h  solution.  Yet 
all  this  psychic  life  is  illuminated  by  spots  of  mental  awaken- 
ing to  the  higher  and  more  complicated  activities  of  a  self- 
conscious  and  apperceptive  sort ;  and  then  we  find  ourselves 
really  judging.  Such  genuine  judgment  is  always  itself  a 
movement  of  consciousness  toward  an  end  which  is  a  men- 
tal synthesis  of  distinguishably  separate  terms. 

But,  second,  after  saying  thus  much  we  must  not  be  con- 
sidered as  advocates  of  that  atomistic  view  of  psychologists 
who  find  insoluble  puzzles  where  none  exist,  and  who  even 
go  to  the  length  of  declaring  impossible  what  is  plain  matter- 
of-fact  in  every  man's  daily  experience.  It  is  not  a  fair 
representation  of  consciousness,  or  even  an  adequate  sug- 
gestion for  an  outline  picture  of  it,  to  compare  its  successive 
states  to  a  line  in  which  the  single  sensations,  or  ideas,  are 
points.  The  so-called  "  stream  of  consciousness  "  may,  not 
inaptly,  be  compared  to  a  river  that  at  times  widens  and  at 
other  times  greatly  narrows  its  bed ;  perhaps  it  sometimes 
also  disappears  underground,  only  to  reappear  on  the  other 


THINKING  AND  KNOWING  145 

side  of  some  considerable  extent  of  the  territory  measured 
by  objective  time.  But  its  unity  is  never,  at  any  instant, 
comparable  to  that  of  a  point  ;  nor  is  the  succession  of  its 
states  in  the  one  life  like  the  succession  of  points,  or  small 
portions,  of  a  physical  line.  The  fact  simply  is  that,  in 
judging,  we  are  in^Hmj^nf  p.r>n^cious__actiye  process  which 
teiHninatcs^tTthe  positing  of  a  unifying  relation  between—  two 


very  significant  in  the  temporal  char- 
acteristics of  judgment  as  an  inseparable  factor  of  cognition  ; 
and  this  is'  the  slowing-up  —  almost  amounting  to  a  pause 
—  in  the  time-rate  of  consciousness,  when  the  business  of 
judging  takes  place.  Nor  is  this  characteristic  a  mere  effect 
in  the  imagination  of  the  subject.  Psycho-physics  shows 
beyond  all  contradiction,  what  every  unsophisticated  observer 
of  men  knew  beforehand,  that  it  takes  time  to  judge.  Un- 
judged  impressions  flit  rapidly,  or  troop  in  confused  swarms 
before  the  mind.  "  There  they  go,"  —  we  are  accustomed 
to  say  ;  as  though  they  were  not  of  our  mind  and  we  could 
not,  therefore,  detain  them.  But  we  "  come  to  "  judgment 
more  slowly  ;  we  bring  the  sensations  and  ideas  to  some 
common  point  of  view,  and  we  take  a  little  time  to  pronounce 
a  synthesis  between  them.  All  this  is,  in  some  sort,  capable 
of  measurement  and  of  expression  in  so  many  one-thousandths 
of  a  second.  How  many  more  cr  you  will  need  to  judge  than 
merely  to  be  the  more  passive  recipient  of  impressions,  can 
be  told  you  in  any  psychological  laboratory.  More  than 
this  ;  we  are  actually  aware  of  taking  a  bit  of  a  pause,  of 
insisting  on  a  suspension  of  judgment,  although  it  seems 
already  to  have  formed  itself,  that  we  may  make  sure  of 
correct  judgment.  This  time  it  is  our  resolve  :  we  will  not 
press  the  key  until  we  have  actually  judged  that  the  removal 
of  the  screen  showed  us  red  instead  of  green  ;  we  will  not 
guess,  or  jump  at  the  conclusion,  but  will  judge  accurately 
the  real  state  of  the  case.  It  is  just  this  judging  activity 

10 


146  THINKING  AND  KNOWING 

which  is  the  essential  thinking  part  of  the  cognitive  process ; 
the  completion  of  the  judgment  marks  the  gaining  of  knowl- 
cdge_as  a  fact  inconsCtcraSn^s^  NoteTiow~characTeristic  and 
peculiaris~~Elie  feelfng  of  relief  and  of  satisfaction  —  the 
pleased  release  from  tension  and  the  joy  of  recognition, 
as  the  judgment  is  formed  !  "  I  have  judged  correctly  "  (ac- 
cording to  fact),  and  "  I  know"  are  two  different  expressions 
for  one  and  the  same  attitude  of  mind. 

In  the  larger  doctrine  of  judgment,  as  a  psychical  affair, 
the  truth  is  illustrated  on  a  larger  scale.  The  man  of  de- 
liberate judgment  is,  other  things  being  equal,  the  man  whose 
cognitions  are  sure,  because  reposing  on  grounds  consciously 
recognized  and  estimated.  And  this  is  as  true  of  those 
judgments  which  enter  into  so-called  immediate  cognitions 
as  of  those  which  constitute  a  body  of  scientific  truth. 
Knowledge  is  born  of  thinking  which  has  arrived  at  the  paus- 
ing place  of  a  judgment,  —  a  finished  product  of  synthetic 
activity.  In  saying  this,  however,  we  must  not  neglect  the 
value  of  "  insight,"  or  underestimate  the  part  which  the 
quick  seizure,  the  divination  under  divine  guidance,  of  the 
truth  has  to  play  in  the  winning  and  the  increasing  of  knowl- 
edge. For  cognition  comes  through  Kennen  as  well  as  through 
Wissen;  indeed,  no  hard  and  fixed  line  can  be  drawn  between 
the  two.  The  poet,  the  artist,  the  inventor,  on  the  one  hand, 
and  on  the  other  hand  the  plodder  to  his  conclusions  along 
the  thorny  path  of  conflicting  facts,  upon  the  wooden  clogs 
of  logic,  both  think  and  also  intuit  what  appears  to  them 
as  true.  But  cognition  par  excellence,  so  far  as  its  thinking 
aspect  is  concerned,  marks  its  own  terminal  as  a  judgment 
arrived  at,  in  view  of  grounds  which  may  seem  either  quite 
envisaged  on  account  of  the  quickness  of  our  flight  from  them 
to  the  terminal  itself,  or  only  dimly  remembered  because 
they  lie  far  back  upon  the  path  which  thought  has  travelled 
to  this  terminal.  In  any  case,  however,  the  distinctive 
feature  of  cognitive  consciousness  is  this :  we  know  only 


THINKING  AND  KNOWING  147 

when  we  alight  upon  the  firm  ground  of  a  completed 
judgment. 

It  is  only  in  books  on  logic  and  psychology  that  judgment 
consists  in  a  combining  of  sensations  and  ideas  with  other 
ideas  or  concepts,  —  all  considered  as  mere  mental  products, 
or  psychical  states.  In  real  life  judgment  is  the  positing  of 
relations  between  the  doings  of  actual  things.  This  is  true  at 
least  of  all  such  judgment  as  brings  knowledge  with  it  or,  in 
any  way,  conduces  to  knowledge.  In  other  words,  when  we 
judge  we  not  merely  effect  a  subjective  combination  that  is 
different  from  any  combination  possible  for  the  ungoverned 
and  flighty  ideas,  but  we  appear  to  ourselves  to  affirm  the 
truth  about  a  transaction  in  reality.  There  are  several  ways 
of  approaching  this  claim  as  to  the  real  nature  and  signifi- 
cance of  the  judgments  which  men  actually  make.  For  ex- 
ample, the  claim  may  be  approached  from  the  logician's  point 
of  view.  But  this  would  lead  us  to  emphasize  the  distinction 
of  "form"  and  "  content,"  and  so,  perhaps,  would  induce  the 
fictitious  doctrine,  in  the  interests  of  the  importance  and  in- 
tegrity of  our  particular  science,  that  content  has  nothing  to 
do  with  the  true  nature  of  judgment.  It  is  the  morphology 
of  judgment,  the  doctrine  of  the  form  of  all  judging,  —  say 
most  of  its  students,  —  which  logic  investigates.  But  here  we 
must  assert,  with  Schuppe,1  that  the  distinction  of  form  and 
content,  as  one  of  opposition  or  contrast,  or  as  other  than 
implying  a  reciprocal  involvement,  cannot  possibly  be  main- 
tained. To  borrow  an  illustration  from  Schopenhauer,  the 
defect  of  neglecting  the  content  shows  the  truth  of  the  Indian 
proverb  : '"  No  lotus  without  a  stem." 

The  doctrine  of  a  form  of  judgment  that  takes  no  account 
of  the  universal  predicate  of  the  content  of  judgment  is  a  toy 
logic.  It  is  much  more  a  "  logic  of  illusion  "  than  is  that  pro- 
cedure of  reason  which  Kant  characterized  by  this  opprobrious 
term.  For  this  is  just  what  judgment  intrinsically  is,  —  a 

1  Erkenntnisstheoretische  Logik,  p.  19. 


148  THINKING  AND  KNOWING 

positing  of  the  existence  of  a  concrete  reality  in  relation  to 
other  realities.  In  the  utterance  of  the  mere  form  of  a  judg- 
ment we  feel  that  we  are  not  really  judging ;  or,  in  so  far  as 
we  are  really  judging,  we  are  judging  something  which  differs 
from  the  mere  form.  We  may  be  judging  indeed  that  this 
form  is  the  correct  form  of  judgment ;  but  even  this  is  a 
judgment,  only  as  it  posits  the  existence  of  a  concrete  reality 
in  relation  to  other  realities  :  "  So  all  men  judge"  is  then  our 
judgment ;  or,  perhaps,  "  This  form  of  a  judgment  appears  to 
me  correct "  (to  accord  with  my  own  remembered  experience 
and  with  that  which  I  judge  other  men  to  have  had).  Much 
more  obviously  true  is  it  that  the  distinction  between  form 
and  content  fails  to  satisfy  the  demands  of  epistemological 
criticism  when  those  so-called  secondary  judgments,  whose 
nature  consists  in  relating  concepts,  are  had  in  mind.  For, 
whatever  the  actual  psychological  process  answering  to  the 
term  "  a  concept "  may  be  understood  to  be,  single  concepts 
are  never  judgments  :  not  even  single  concepts  of  relation. 
Nor  do  mere  combinations  of  concepts  form  judgments  ;  it  is 
the  added  conviction  of  positing  the  truth  of  what  is  thought, 
which  converts  the  conceptual  flow  of  consciousness  into  a 
genuine  act  of  judging.  When  the  consciousness  of  objective 
validity  is  wanting,  then  judgment  is  wanting  ;  or  if  judgment 
seem  to  be  there  (as  it  is  usually,  if  not  universally,  because  no 
man  satisfies  himself  long  by  toying  with  his  logical  faculty), 
then  it  is  judgment  affirming  some  other  real  relation  than 
that  which  is  clearly  expressed  by  the  related  conceptions. 

The  fuller  description  of  the  knowledge  that  comes  by 
sense-perception  and  by  self-consciousness,  and  that-is  called 
immediate  in  distinction  from  the  knowledge  which  is  inferred 
by  virtue  of  its  recognized  connection  with  remoter  grounds, 
must  be  waited  for  in  order  to  defend  further  this  view  of  judg- 
ment, as  the  form  of  thinking  in  which  cognition  is  estab- 
lished. "  I  perceive  the  snow  to  be  white  ; "  such  a  sentence 
throws  the  burden  of  the  judgment  upon  the  testimony  of 


THINKING  AND  KNOWING  149 

self-consciousness.  But  when  I  give  this  form  to  the  asser- 
tion of  my  act  of  accomplished  cognition,  I  affirm  a  relation 
which  is  judged  to  exist  between  me  and  the  extra-mentally 
existent  thing.  Thus  far  the  judgment  is  certainly  true,  a 
mental  positing  of  an  actual  relation.  I  do  perceive  the  ob- 
ject-thing as  my  judgment  asserts  that  I  do.  "The  snow  is 
white;"  such  a  sentence  throws  the  burden  of  the  judgment, 
so  to  speak,  upon  the  extra-mentally  existent  thing  itself.  It 
brings  to  my  consciousness,  and  to  the  consciousness  of  all 
who  hear  and  understand  me,  that  the  whiteness  of  the  snow 
is  a  fact  to  be  recognized  by  every  one  who  can  and  will  put 
himself  in  like  conditions  for  judgment.  In  every  judgment 
of  perception,  as  an  integral  part  of  the  cognitive  act  itself, 
there  is  discoverable  the  binding  conviction  that  the  object  of 
perception  exists  and  is  actually  so  constituted  as  we  imagine 
and  think  it  to  be.  Judgment,  in  general,  is  not  genuine  JUDG- 
MENT, as  distinguished  from  mere  sequence  of  mental  states, 
without  a  trans-subjective  reference,  an  implication  of  the 
actual  connection  of  different  "  momenta  "  in  a  really  existent 
world. 

In  saying  this,  however,  we  have  already  arrived  at  the 
conclusion  that  judgment  involves,  as  a  necessary  condition 
of  its  own  making,  something  more  than  mere  judgment,  if 
by  the  words  "  mere  judgment "  we  limit  our  meaning  to  a 
form  of  thought.  As  a  form  of  thought,  there  is  also  im- 
plied in  judgment  willing  and  feeling,  —  at  least  in  the  form 
of  "  feeling-sure  ; "  and  besides,  a  postulated  correspondence 
of  the  trans-subjective  with  that  kind  of  active,  feeling-full 
thought  which  all  cognition  involves.  But  this  amounts  to 
saying  that  in  all  actual  judging  the  subject  is  doing  some- 
thing more  than  judging,  and  is  suffering  in  other  forms  than 
those  of  the  impression  made  by  the  "  ideation-stuff  "  of  the 
judgment  itself.  Thus  much  is  true  in  fact ;  and  it  is  truth 
which  no  theory  of  knowledge  can  afford  to  neglect.  Post- 
poning for  later  chapters  the  further  culture  of  this  truth, 


150  THINKING  AND  KNOWING 

we  may  most  fitly  gather  a  handful  of  fruitage  from  the  path 
which  has  just  been  traversed. 

It  is  not  (as  Hegel  seems  to  teach)  the  doctrine  of  the 
concept,  but  the  doctrine  of  the  judgment  in  which  we  find  : 
(1)  negatively,  the  denial  of  the  possibility  of  absolute  scepti- 
cism, of  dogmatic  agnosticism,  and  of  solipsistic  idealism ; 
and  (2)  positively,  the  foundations  for  a  valid  episternology 
and  metaphysics. 

On  the  first  point  our  analysis  of  the  judgment  has  shown 
what  all  subsequent  epistemological  criticism  will  confirm, 
that  a  consistent  and  thorough  agnosticism  or  sceptical  ideal- 
ism is  impossible  as  a  theory  of  knowledge.  It  is  impossible 
as  theory,  because  it  is  contradictory  of  the  very  nature  of 
that  primary  act  of  cognition  from  the  criticism  of  which  all 
attempt  at  an  epistemological  theory  has  its  rise,  and  in  the 
interpretation  of  which  all  the  conclusions  of  any  particular 
theory  must  repose.  Cognition  involves  thinking  in  the  form 
of  judgment ;  but  judgment  cannot  be  considered  as  a  merely 
formal  and  subjective  activity,  because,  as  a  matter  of  fact, 
it  is  not  such  an  activity.  It  is  the  positing  of  reality,  as 
diverse  and  yet  necessarily  capable  of  unification,  —  in  a  way 
full  of  feeling,  and  full  of  will,  as  well  as  full  of  thought. 
That  is,  he  who  judges,  passes  judgment  upon  the  truth ; 
and  in  doing  this  affirms  both  himself  and  his  object  to  be 
something  more  and  far  other  than  mere  thought-process  and 
mere  object  of  thought. 

Furthermore,  the  reality  posited  in  every  act  of  true  judg- 
ment is  posited  as  a  related  reality,  —  not  only  that  it  is,  but 
what  it  is,  so  far  as  here  and  now  judged,  in  the  completed  act 
of  cognition.  Here  appears  in  the  background  the  shadow  of 
a  postulate  that  may  come  to  be  recognized  as  bearing  a  noble 
and  truly  divine  form.  For  the  universal  assumption  of  every 
judgment  of  immediate  cognition  is  this :  What  is  subjec- 
tively united  in  my  act  of  judging  belongs  together  in  the  unity 
of  the  really  existent  world.  I  unite  these  elements,  which  to 


THINKING  AND  KNOWING  151 

sense  seem  scattered  and  diverse,  by  judging  them  to  belong 
together  ;  but  I  so  unite  them  as  to  reveal  my  conviction  that 
they  are  trans-subjectively  combined,  extra-mentally  united 
in  the  unity  of  the  Real.  If  this  is  not  what  my  judgment 
means  to  me  and  to  others,  it  falls  short  of  fixing  for  me,  or 
of  expressing  to  them,  my  arrival  at  one  of  the  firm  points 
of  standing  called  a  cognition. 

How  meagre,  however,  would  the  body  of  human  knowl- 
edge appear,  if  it  were  reduced  to  the  dimensions  covered 
only  by  so-called  "  immediate  "  or  "  intuitive  "  acts  of  cogni- 
tion !  It  is,  pre-eminently,  by  thinking  that  men  arrive  at 
conceptual  or  inferential  knowledge.  And  the  form  of  stating 
such  knowledge  may  be  said  to  be  the  "  logical  judgment." 
Logical  judgment  is  a  synthesis  effected  between  concepts  ; 
therefore  the  kind  of  knowledge  which  it  embodies  and  con- 
serves may  be  called  "  conceptual."  It  is  built  up  by  thinking 
one's  way —  at  least,  so  this  mental  constructive  work  is  de- 
scribed by  the  current  books  on  logic  —  through  concepts,  that 
serve  as  "  middle-terms,"  to  other  concepts ;  it  is  a  thought- 
process  in  which  the  consciousness  of  the  truth  of  the  final 
judgment,  that  marks  the  new  point  of  cognition  gained,  is 
preceded  by  consciousness  of  the  grounds,  or  reasons,  from 
which  this  truth  is  inferred.  Therefore,  the  kind  of  knowl- 
edge which  this  judgment  embodies  and  conserves  may  be 
called  "  inferential."  Great  and  even  bitter  controversy  has 
been  held  between  the  partisans  of  the  superior  claims  of 
immediate  or  intuitive  and  of  conceptual  or  inferential  knowl- 
edge,—  the  one  accusing  the  other  of  narrowness,  lack  of 
science,  and  excessive  devotion  to  fact,  and  the  other  retort- 
ing with  accusations  of  excessive  airiness,  abstraction,  and 
disregard  for  matter  of  fact.  Separate  faculties  have  even 
been  devised  for  the  attainment  of  these  two  kinds  of  knowl- 
edge ;  and  the  controversy  has  overrun  the  boundaries  of 
psychology  and  raged  within  the  fields  of  epistemology  and 
metaphysics.  Kant,  Hegel,  and  Schopenhauer  have  agreed 


152  THINKING  AND  KNOWING 

in  arraying  Verstand  against  Vernunft,  while  differing  much 
in  their  conception  of  the  legitimate  use  of  these  terms. 

What  now  are  the  facts  in  the  case  which  a  critical  epis- 
temology  must  decide  ?  What,  as  interpreted  by  a  psychol- 
ogy which  is  true  to  actual  mental  life,  is  the  nature  and 
the  growth  of  cognition  as  dependent  upon  acquired  facility 
in  thinking  ?  In  brief,  the  principle  of  continuity  reigns 
throughout ;  and  there  is  no  break  between  the  two  kinds  of 
knowledge,  as  there  is  no  generic  or  specific  difference  in  the 
employment  of  thinking  faculty  in  gaining  the  two  kinds. 
Judgment  without  both  human  understanding  and  human 
reason  (whatever  may  be  the  distinctions  set  up  between  the 
two)  is  not  human  judgment.  Understanding,  that  is  not 
rational,  is  not  human  understanding.  And  reason,  that  is 
devoid  of  understanding  or  totally  separated  from  its  intelli- 
gent base,  is  a  barren  fiction  ;  if  it  exists  anywhere,  it  is  not 
the  reason  of  man.  Science,  as  a  form  of  cognition,  rests 
upon  no  different  foundations  from  those  upon  which  ordi- 
nary knowledge  rests;  and  it  involves  no  different  forms  of 
mental  activity  from  those  which  every  man  employs  in  his 
work-a-day  life.  Moreover,  the  whole  mental  life  and  activ- 
ity is  essentially  the  same,  when  we  know  the  tree,  the  stone, 
the  human  face,  over  there  opposite  to  us,  as  when  we,  by 
processes  of  subtle  dialectic,  or  by  the  leap  of  faith,  arrive 
at  the  atomic  theory,  or  the  cognition  (or  postulate)  of  the 
Personal  Absolute  called  God. 

Further,  negatively,  it  must  be  asserted  that  no  entities, 
not  even  of  the  psychical  sort,  no  mental  products,  no  states 
of  consciousness,  corresponding  to  the  customary  description 
of  the  "  concept,"  or  the  "  syllogism,"  are  anywhere  to  be 
found.1 

Positive  testimony  of  consciousness  is  not  wanting,  how- 
ever, to  the  important  modifications  in  that  mental  attitude 

1  As  to  the  true  psychological  nature  of  the  concept,  see  "  Psychology,  De- 
scriptive and  Explanatory,"  chapters  xiv.,  xix.,  xx. 


THINKING  AND  KNOWING  153 

toward  reality  which  the  activity  of  thinking  assumes  in 
order  to  make  possible  a  growth  of  knowledge.  The  u  leap  " 
to  the  judgment  which  expresses  the  finality  of  the  thinking 
process,  the  journey  to  the  terminal  of  cognition,  may  vary 
greatly  in  its  degree  of  speed.  The  number  of  conscious 
"  momenta  "  that  can  be  remembered,  or  recognized  as  fus- 
ing in  the  judgment,  so  to  speak,  may  also  vary.  Immediate 
judgment  is  judgment  with  little  or  no  clear  consciousness 
of  the  grounds ;  but  judgment,  as  the  recognized  result  of  a 
reasoning  process,  is  judgment  with  more  or  less  of  clear 
consciousness  of  its  own  grounds.  It  is  the  former  kind  of 
judgment  which  is  prominent  in  both  sense-perception  and 
self-consciousness ;  it  is  the  latter  which  the  construction 
of  scientific  knowledge  demands.  The  sensation-content 
involved  in  the  thinking  process,  and  upon  the  basis  of  which 
thinking  proceeds,  varies  greatly  in  quantity.  It  also  differs 
qualitatively ;  so  that  sometimes  judgment  is  absorbed  in 
the  determination  of  the  size  or  quality  of  a  thing,  some- 
times in  the  nature  and  meaning  of  an  affection  of  Self. 
Especially  does  the  form  taken  by  the  postulate  of,  the  feel- 
ing of  belief  in,  and  the  more  or  less  voluntary  seizure  upon, 
reality  differ  with  the  different  kinds  of  judgment  involved 
in  the  cognitive  act.  Sometimes  the  real  object  appears  as 
an  undoubted  envisagement ;  sometimes  as  an  inference  so 
doubtful  that  we  hesitate  to  call  the  resulting  judgment  a 
cognition  rather  than  a  mere  opinion  or  belief.  These  forms 
of  variation  in  the  thinking  process,  and  in  its  result,  occasion 
marked  differences  between  our  necessitated  belief  in  the 
reality  of  the  known  object  of  sense  or  of  self-consciousness, 
and  our  quest  after  certified  truth  as  to  the  general  relations 
and  laws  of  minds  and  of  things.  In  the  former  case  we 
feel  that  the  reality  is  a  fact,  —  given  to  us,  not  as  the  form 
of  our  thoughts,  but  with  the  irresistible  conviction  that  the 
reality  is  there  and  that  we  are  in  commerce  with  it.  In 
the  latter  case,  we  feel  that  the  form  of  our  thoughts  is 


154  THINKING  AND  KNOWING 

a  true  picture  of  the  forms,  in  reality,  of  minds  or  of 
things. 

In  all  conceptual  knowledge,  as  in  so  called  immediate 
knowledge,  it  is  the  judgment  which  constitutes  the  final 
form  of  the  thinking  that  enters  into  the  cognition.  Indeed, 
psychologically  considered,  conception  is  itself  a  modification 
of  the  content  and  succession  of  our  conscious  states  in  which 
judgments  are  the  only  possible  representatives  of  reality. 
The  very  process  of  conception  consists  in  having  a  number 
of  highly  schematized  ideas,  that  are  judged  to  be  related  in 
certain  definite  rather  than  other  ways.  The  moment,  how- 
ever, we  come  to  inquire  after  the  truth  of  this  process  of 
so-called  conception,  we  find  that  the  inquiry  ends  in  a  de- 
mand for  the  truth  of  our  own  relating  acts,  —  that  is,  of  the 
judgments  themselves.  But  to  inquire  into  the  "  truth  "  of 
judgments,  it  must  be  assumed  that  they  are  capable  of  being 
patterned,  so  to  speak,  after  the  actual  relations  of  things. 
Here  again,  then,  we  see  that  it  is  the  true  doctrine  of  judg- 
ment which  must  be  relied  upon  for  the  validating  of  human 
thought  about  things.  Every  so-called  concept  implies  both 
mental  representations  as  its  content,  and  also  judging  ac- 
tivity as  giving  form  to  its  content.  The  determinate  flow 
of  the  successive  judgments  toward  that  one  judgment  which 
posits  the  truth  which  the  mind  is  seeking,  and  the  conscious- 
ness of  this  flow  as  being  determined  in  its  connections  by  the 
facts  of  experience,  are  the  necessary  elements  of  every  act  of 
reasoning.  Here,  again,  the  result  can  be  called  knowledge 
only  upon  the  supposition  that  the  judgments  which  enter  into 
the  process  of  reasoning  have  something  far  other  than  mere 
correctness  of  form. 

What  follows,  then,  in  order  to  vindicate  the  claim  made 
by  all  the  more  highly  abstract  and  conceptual  forms  of 
thought,  to  be  a  means  or  vehicle  of  cognition  ?  These  forms 
certainly  make  this  claim,  since  they  present  themselves  as 
a  series  of  judgments  leading  up  to  a  final  judgment  in  which, 


THINKING  AND  KNOWING  155 

as  in  a  court  of  highest  jurisdiction,  truth  appears  enthroned. 
And  if  the  claim  does  not  carry  its  own  vindication,  or  some- 
how admit  of  being  vindicated  from  without,  all  science  is 
convicted  of  giving  the  lie  to  its  very  name.  For  it  is  in  its 
concepts,  and  in  its  judgments  relating  these  concepts,  that 
the  truth  of  science  consists.  But  here,  again,  the  very  nature 
of  judgment,  as  it  enters  into  all  acts  both  of  conception  and 
of  reasoning,  becomes  the  invincible  fortress  against  the  ex- 
tremes of  agnosticism  and  of  sceptical  idealism. 

Consider,  however,  in  brief,  what  seems  postulated  as  to 
the  nature  of  the  cognitive  process,  and  as  to  its  claims  to 
truth,  in  the  very  doctrine  of  the  concept.  This  doctrine 
shows  that  the  mental  process  of  conception  is  indeed  a 
change,  but  a  change  subject  to  laws.  The  character  of  this 
process  is  changeable ;  were  it  not  so,  growth  of  knowledge 
would  be  impossible.  But  it  has  also  the  permanent  in  it; 
and  were  this  not  so,  truth  would  be  impossible  of  attainment 
in  the  form  of  conceptual  knowledge.  What  further  is  im- 
plicate as  to  the  really  existent,  thus  known  in  the  form  of 
the  conceptual  judgment?  It,  too,  this  object  itself,  the 
Reality  known,  must  actually  change ;  but  not  all  at  once, 
so  to  speak,  or  at  random,  and  in  a  wild  unregulated  way. 
It,  too,  must  change  in  time,  and  according  to  fixed  and 
immanent  ideas.  The  fixedness  of  the  object,  as  given  to 
conceptual  knowledge,  in  contrast  with  the  changing  activity 
of  the  conceiving  and  knowing  subject,  is  itself  only  a  more 
definite  measure  both  of  change  and  of  permanence  :  shall 
we  say  —  of  the  permanence  of  the  Idea  as  immanent  in  the 
changing  states  of  the  object  ?  But  I,  too,  the  subject,  can- 
not change  in  an  unlimited  way,  either  as  respects  the  time 
or  the  direction  of  change.  If,  however,  my  series  of  judg- 
ments is  to  be  thought  of  as  true  (and  if  they  are  not  to 
be  thus  thought  of,  then  conceptual  knowledge  is  impossible 
for  me),  the  changes  in  me  must,  in  some 'sort  and  to  some 
degree,  follow  the  laws  of  the  changes  in  the  object.  To 


156  THINKING  AND  KNOWING 

know  any  Thing,  I  must  conceive  of  it  as  it  really  is,  as  main- 
taining a  certain  fidelity  to  its  own  nature,  while  constantly 
changing  its  particular  manifestations  toward  me,  toward 
other  minds,  and  toward  other  things.  Let  us  try  to  repre- 
sent this  by  a  formula :  And  let  S  stand  for  me,  the  subject ; 
but  0  stand  for  the  object  which  I  conceive  of  as  always 
acting  according  to  its  nature  when  truly  conceived.  Then,  in 
some  sort,  it  must  be  possible  that  S\  <S2,  Ss,  /S*,  =  Oa,  0?,  0", 
Ov.  That  is,  I  can  representatively  judge  what  0  is,  con- 
sidered as  passing  through  a  series  of  states  ranging  from 
1  toward  oo.  But  as  to  the  meaning  of  the  sign  of  equality 
(the  =  which  stands  between  the  series  S  and  the  series  0), 
we  have  as  yet  only  a  clue. 

Now,  undoubtedly,  there  is  no  little  metaphysics  as  well 
as  episteinology  concealed  in  the  foregoing  paragraph ;  and 
one  is  not  compelled  to  take  all  of  either  until  both  have 
been  further  criticised  and  discussed.  Meantime  the  postulate 
may  perhaps  as  well  be  left  in  a  form  given  to  it  by  Lotze : 
"  The  real  world  does  not  fall  asunder,  atomistisch,  into 
merely  singular  constituents,  each  of  which  is  incomparable 
with  the  others ;  but  between  its  contents,  similarities,  kin- 
ship, and  relations  exist."  The  "  petrifaction,"  and  then  the 
objectifying  and  converting  into  realities,  of  concepts,  has 
much  to  answer  for  in  the  history  of  philosophy.  It  was 
one  of  Hegel's  merits  of  intention  that  he  aimed  to  do  away 
with  this.  But,  alas !  for  the  relapse  of  some  of  his  disciples, 
who  seem  to  have  petrified  and  then  hypostasized  the  very 
conception  of  "  process  "  itself.  On  the  ground  of  psychology, 
a  certain  merit  —  though  largely  of  a  negative  order  —  is 
due  to  writers  like  Bacon,  Hobbes,  Locke,  Berkeley,  and 
Hume.  But  if  the  view  they  controverted  seemed  to  con- 
tradict the  descriptive  history  of  mental  phenomena,  the 
view  they  advocated  left  all  the  foundations  of  science  either 
in  the  clouds  of  emotion  or  in  the  underground  of  blind  and 
unverifiable  instinct.  The  doctrine  of  judgment  carries  with 


THINKING  AND  KNOWING  157 

it,  in  the  concrete  facts  of  experience  and  in  the  implicates 
which  an  analysis  of  experience  reveals,  the  correctives  for 
both  of  these  erroneous  extremes. 

Further  illustration  and  confirmation  of  similar  postulates 
follows  from  a  consideration  of  the  way  in  which  men  reason 
and  argue  ahout  what  shall  be  accepted  and  esteemed  as 
"  truth."  Thought  is,  indeed,  subject  to  its  own  laws,  to 
the  principles  which  define  logical  necessity.  Actuality  is 
what  it  is,  as  fact ;  and  that  is  the  last  word  about  it.  Yes, 
but  most  of  what  I  know,  and  of  what  the  race  knows,  has 
come  by  those  processes  of  thinking  which  are  properly  de- 
scribed as  reasoning  from  accepted  grounds  to  new  conclusions 
that,  when  the  grounds  are  valid  and  the  form  of  reasoning 
correct,  assume  the  claims  of  knowledge.  So  that  here,  again, 
it  is  not  the  mere  necessity  of  a  logical  determination,  but 
the  comprehension  of  actuality  by  human  cognitive  faculty, 
which  is  the  law  and  the  goal  of  human  science.  It  is  this 
assumption  of  an  actual  relation,  common  to  thought  and  to 
things,  through  some  middle  third,  which  gives  us  the  right 
to  speak  of  real  specific  resemblances,  real  specific  differences. 
real  universal  relations  called  laws,  etc.  What,  indeed,  is 
the  ultimate  ground  on  which  is  assumed  the  applicability 
of  any  process  of  syllogistic  reasoning  to  real  things  ?  And 
how  shall  epistemological  theory  account  for  the  larger  fact 
of  race  experience,  that  the  attempt  to  apply  syllogistic  reason- 
ing to  real  things  is  successful  in  enlarging  the  knowledge 
of  the  race  ?  Only  on  this  ground  and  in  this  way  :  a  real 
conformity  to  law  exists  and  is  cognizable  according  to  the 
principle  of  sufficient  reason. 

But  so-called  syllogistic  acts  of  reasoning  are,  in  reality, 
successions  of  judgments  in  which  the  mind  climbs  from  step- 
ping-stone to  stepping-stone  along  the  path  of  cognition, — 
clad  with  the  full  armor  of  feeling  and  of  will,  and  of  all 
that  belongs  to  the  mind's  life,  as  it  takes  each  step.  Never 
does  the  mind  appear  to  itself  so  lightly  weighted  and  so 


158  THINKING  AND  KNOWING 

thin  a  ghost  as  to  seem  merely  to  be  doing  a  bit  of  logical 
thinking.  In  fact,  in  the  succession  and  character  of  its 
judgments,  as  it  pursues  the  truth,  it  rarely  follows  the  form 
of  the  syllogism  at  all.  For  reasoning,  too,  is  not  capable 
of  being  understood  merely  content-wise.  The  rather  does 
judgment,  only  when  already  affirmed  as  familiar  and  ex- 
pressive of  truth,  suggest  and  stimulate  other  judgment 
which  may  perchance,  but  not  necessarily,  contain  unfamiliar 
and  even  new  truth. 

Suppose,  for  example,  I  judge,  on  the  basis  of  successive 
observations,  that  Uranus  is  not  behaving  as  she  should  in 
view  of  what  I  know  of  her  relations  to  her  companion  planets. 
I  judge  next  that  there  may  be,  or  there  must  be,  another 
companion  planet  of  which  no  knowledge  has  been  had  as 
yet.  I  then  look  to  the  place  where  this  new  planet  should 
be  in  order  to  give  grounds  for  the  irregular  behavior  of 
Uranus ;  and  now  Neptune  is  "  intuitively "  known  to  be 
there.  Or  suppose  I  am  told  of  a  man  who  did  not  die ;  and  I 
exclaim:  "No,  for  men  universally  die."  Indeed,  it  belongs 
to  the  very  nature  of  man  to  die.  But  evidence  is  offered 
that  such  a  case  of  an  immortal  man  did  in  fact  occur;  and 
reasons  are  presented  why  I  may  alter  my  former  judgment 
without  disturbing  too  fundamentally  the  entire  structure  of 
my  experience.  And  now  I  may  hesitate  to  repeat  my  judg- 
ment; or  I  may  form  a  new  judgment  admitting  cases  of 
exception  to  the  "universal"  law;  or  I  may  adhere  to  my 
judgment  in  its  earlier  form.  Such  is  the  flux  in  the  nar- 
row field  of  the  individual  man's  cognition;  such,  too,  is 
the  flux  in  the  larger  field  of  the  scientific  acquirements  of 
the  race.  If  the  assumption  of  an  objective  connection  is 
merely  feigned  and  subjective,  as  the  sceptic  would  have  us 
suppose,  then  knowledge  by  processes  of  reasoning  is  impos- 
sible. But  if  the  objective  connection  is  itself  a  universally 
fixed  substrate,  a  kind  of  unchanging  being  of  things,  as 
certain  dogmatists  would  present  it  to  imagination,  then  the 


THINKING  AND  KNOWING  159 

life  we  think  we  cognize  is  gone  out  of  the  real  world.  An 
actual  happening,  indeed,  but  a  happening  under  the  regu- 
lating principle  of  ideas  would  seem  to  be  the  only  postulate 
as  to  the  nature  of  Reality  which  will  validate  the  attainment 
of  knowledge  by  processes  of  reasoning. 

Further  with  reference  to  the  problems  raised  by  the 
analysis  of  this  chapter,  there  is  no  need  to  inquire  at  the 
present  time.  Already  it  is  at  least  apparent  what  some  of 
these  problems  are ;  and  certain  of  them  are  obviously  meta- 
physical in  character.  Among  the  more  definitely  epistemo- 
logical  questions  involved  are  such  as  follow:  What  are, 
more  precisely,  those  laws  of  thought  —  of  judgment,  con- 
ception, and  reasoning  —  whose  objective  validity  is  implied 
in  all  that  knowledge  which  comes  by  thought  ?  On  what 
more  ultimate  grounds  than  any  thus  far  uncovered  must  our 
confidence  in  the  validity  of  these  laws  be  placed  ?  What 
may  be  discovered  regarding  the  relations  in  which  we,  as 
cognizing  subjects,  stand  to  the  Reality  made  valid  for  us  in 
our  processes  of  cognition  ?  How  may  we  test  truth,  and 
discover  error,  and  so  think  as  to  have  our  judgments  ratify 
their  claim  to  real  knowledge  ?  How  shall  the  total  faculty 
of  human  cognition  be  defended  against  the  attacks  which 
would  destroy,  or  most  severely  shake,  its  very  foundations  ? 
And,  finally,  what  view  of  the  World-All  seems  best  to 
comport  with  the  essential  dignity  and  worth  of  human 
cognition  ? 

But  these  are  profound  and  difficult  questions;  and  per- 
haps some  of  them  are  unanswerable.  At  all  events,  they 
must  be  approached  through  a  truer  and  more  comprehen- 
sive conception  of  the  psychological  nature  and  growth  of 
knowledge. 


CHAPTER   VI 

KNOWLEDGE  AS  FEELING  AND  WILLING 

'"PHE  psychology  of  feeling  is  still  in  a  most  unsatisfactory 
•!•  condition.  Nor  are  the  reasons  for  this  condition 
profound  or  difficult  to  discover;  although  when  discovered 
and  reflected  upon,  they  turn  out  to  be  such  as  to  encour- 
age only  a  partial  hope  of  their  amelioration  or  ultimate 
removal.  These  reasons  are  partly  historical ;  but,  chiefly, 
they  spring  out  of  the  very  nature  of  the  subject  of  all  psy- 
chological inquiry.  Until  comparatively  recent  times  the 
entire  movement  of  the  science  of  mental  life  and  all  the 
interests  of  its  students  were  directed  toward  a  better  under- 
standing of  so-called  sensations,  ideas,  and  thoughts  or  other 
logical  processes.  To  think  =  to  be  a  soul,  was  an  indis- 
putable formula  of  the  Cartesian  psychology.  And  when 
this  rational  psychology  was  most  vigorously  contested,  the 
formula  substituted  ran  somewhat  as  follows :  To  be  a  tabula 
rasa  for  sensations,  and  a  play-room  for  the  disporting  of 
revived  and  associated  images  of  sensations  =  all  there  is 
of  soul.  We  have  already  seen,  too,  how  the  critical  theory 
of  knowledge,  in  the  hands  of  its  great  modern  author,  con- 
fined itself  to  the  formal  laws  of  thinking  faculty. 

This  relative  disregard  of  the  psychology  of  feeling  and 
volition,  as  they  enter  so  abundantly  into  that  conduct 
which  has  been  called  three  fourths,  or  even  seven  eighths  of 
life,  accounts  in  part  for  the  meagreness  of  recognition  given 
by  epistemological  doctrine  to  these  aspects  of  mind.  But, 
of  late,  psychology  has  been  cultivated  in  a  more  biological 
and  interesting  way.  Psychological  analysis,  with  the  in- 


KNOWLEDGE  AS  FEELING  AND  WILLING          161 

definitely  greater  subtlety  and  more  varied  and  searching 
appliances  that  characterize  its  modern  types,  shows  what 
an  exceedingly  complex  affair  human  mental  life  really  is. 
Into  all  this  life  enter  an  indescribably  great  number  of 
"  moments  "  or  influential  factors.  Investigation  is  rapidly 
advancing  in  the  recognition,  at  least,  of  these  complex 
factors ;  and  thus,  as  a  purely  descriptive  science,  psychology 
has  recently  made  large  and  commendable  advances.  Some- 
thing has  also  been  done  toward  explaining  anew  the  primary 
truths  of  mental  life,  —  this,  by  way  of  discovering  the  laws 
of  the  interaction  of  the  factors,  or,  more  frequently,  of 
giving  to  psychological  facts,  already  well  known,  the 
appearance  of  a  scientific  character  by  stating  them  in  terms 
of  exact  formulas  proved  by  psycho-physical  measurements. 
But  there  are  certain  fields  of  the  psychic  life  which  are 
naturally  difficult  of  penetration,  or  even  of  entrance  with 
the  surveying  instruments  —  the  theodolite,  the  chain,  the 
stakes,  and  the  poles  —  of  the  modern  psychologist.  Here 
effectively  work  the  obscure  hereditary  instincts,  the  blind 
unreasoning  beliefs  that  creep  about  the  very  roots  of  the 
earliest  cognitions.  Here  occur  vague  assumptions  of  values, 
impulsive  and  often  spasmodic  and  inexplicable  leaps,  over 
the  barriers  of  fact  and  of  calmly  reasoned  conclusions, 
through  atmosphere  charged  with  the  electricity  of  emotion, 
into  the  very  heart  of  Reality  itself.  Here  is  done  the  artistic 
building,  under  the  influence  of  agsthetical  and  ethical  feel- 
ings, whose  products  cannot  safely,  and  indeed  cannot  at  all, 
be  kept  out  of  our  most  ordinary  experiences;  for  they,  too, 
belong  to  the  general  structure  of  human  knowledge. 

It  is  not  to  be  wondered  at,  then,  that  introspective  and 
experimental  psychology  finds  the  greatest  difficulty  in  com- 
ing to  an  agreement  concerning  the  nature  and  laws  of  that 
part  of  our  mental  life  whose  very  nature  seems  to  free  it 
from  all  obedience  to  discoverable  law.  For  there  is  no 
greater  "psychologist's  fallacy"  than  to  identify  thoughts 

n 


162          KNOWLEDGE  AS  FEELING  AND  WILLING 

about  the  feelings  with  the  actuality  of  the  feelings  them- 
selves. But  the  inevitable  difficulties  of  the  subject  are  not, 
just  now,  the  principal  obstacle  in  the  way  of  its  gradual 
conquest  by  scientific  observers.  There  is  an  opinion  con- 
cerning the  nature  of  all  feeling,  which  is  held,  perhaps,  by 
the  majority  of  writers  on  psychology,  although  intelligently 
and  vigorously  combated  by  a  few  of  the  first  rank,  but  which 
is  so  incredible  that  its  naked  statement  might  well  seem 
equivalent  to  its  disproof.  This  opinion  identifies  all  human 
feeling  with  the  pleasure-pain  series,  and  all  variations 
of  feeling,  as  such,  with  quantitative  changes  in  this  series. 
Some  advocates  of  this  opinion  class"  all  the  feelings  with 
the  sensations;  since  all  pleasure-pain  (which  =  all  feeling) 
belongs  to  the  sensational  content  of  consciousness.  And 
thus  from  high  to  low,  as  estimated  even  qualitatively  and 
by  a  standard  of  sesthetical  or  ethical  values,  the  account  of 
the  rich  and  varied  affective  phenomena  of  man's  life  be- 
comes like  a  sum  in  algebra  that  has  only  one  indeterminate 
quantity.  The  psychology  of  feeling  is  then  only  a  question 
of  how  large  is  the  value  in  any  case  of  this  x;  and  whether 
it  is  a  case  of  +  x  or  of  —  x.  Sancta  simplicitas!  but  not  of 
the  feeling  soul  of  man;  the  rather  of  the  analytic  mind  of 
such  psychologists. 

The  confutation  of  so  inadequate  a  view  of  human  feeling, 
by  facing  it  with  the  facts  of  consciousness  when  investi- 
gated in  thoroughly  analytic  fashion,  belongs  to  descriptive 
psychology.1  In  the  two  just  previous  chapters  it  has  been 
shown  how  the  psychology  of  knowledge  in  general,  and,  in 
a  more  particular  way,  of  judgment  as  the  constitutive 
thinking  element  of  knowledge,  recognizes  the  function  of 
feeling.  But  in  order  to  lay  a  sound  and  comprehensive 
basis  for  the  most  important  epistemological  conclusions,  it 
is  necessary  that  .the  part  which  feeling  plays  in  all  cogni- 
tion should  be  further  investigated. 

1  See  Psychology,  Descriptive  and  Explanatory,  chapters  ix.,  x.,  xxiii.,  xxiv. 


KNOWLEDGE  AS  FEELING  AND  WILLING  163 

It  is  often  assumed,  even  by  those  who  do  not  accept  the 
identification  of  the  entire  life  of  feeling  with  the  changing 
quanta  of  the  pleasure-pain  series,  that  cognition  is  espe- 
cially devoid  of  feeling,  if  not  actually  antagonistic  to 
feeling.  But  an  act  of  cognition  is  the  fullest  expression  of 
the  fact  of  mental  life.  When  I  know,  then  I  am  —  full  of 
life,  full-orbed  in  my  being,  "  all  in  it, "  as  it  were,  and  as 
at  no  other  time.  But  if  the  "I,"  that  am  now  come  to  the 
fullest  realization  of  my  Self  in  the  act  of  cognition,  am 
essentially  a  being  of  feeling,  as  well  as  a  thinking  and 
willing  subject  of  states,  then  how  can  this  act  of  cognition 
itself  be  constituted  otherwise  than  as  a  feeling-full  affair  ? 
And  how  can  a  large  variety  and  profound  depth  of  feeling 
be  separable  from  any  act  of  cognition,  not  to  say  the  con- 
trary, or  contradictory  of  any  such  act  ? 

It  is,  indeed,  a  fact  of  universal  experience,  and  a  truth  of 
general  recognition  in  psychology,  that  a  certain  kind  and 
amount  of  emotional  excitement  is  unfavorable  to  knowledge. 
Intense  anger  is  blind;  and  so  are  all  the  other  forms  of 
feeling  when  raised  to  the  emotional  stage  of  intensity. 
The  psychology  of  the  emotions  shows  that  their  indispen- 
sable characteristic  is  a  strong  feeling  of  the  bodily  and 
mental  disturbances  already  brought  about  in  the  organism 
and  in  the  train  of  associated  ideas  or  the  succession  of 
combined  thoughts.  But  excessive  disturbance  of  the  ideas 
and  thoughts  prevents  our  arriving  at  a  state  of  assured  cog- 
nition. How,  then,  can  much  feeling,  of  whatever  kind,  be 
otherwise  than  unfavorable  to  knowledge  ?  This  question 
has  been  answered  by  the  proposal  of  a  law  of  consciousness 
which  would  make  feeling  and  knowledge  vary  inversely. 

There  is,  however,  another  side  to  the  influence  of  the 
affective  factors  upon  our  states  of  cognition;  or,  rather, 
there  are  several  different  sides  to  be  considered  in  inter- 
preting correctly  our  experience  of  feeling.  First,  all 
conscious  states  fall  under  the  general  principle  of  limi- 


164          KNOWLEDGE  AS  FEELING  AND  WILLING 

tation  or  finiteness;  and  more  multifoldness  of  content, 
or  quantity  of  psychic  energy,  than  a  given  limit  cannot 
be  attained  in  any  psychosis  whatever.  There  is,  there- 
fore, a  certain  truth  in  the  figure  of  speech  which  rep- 
resents the  Ego  as  being  unable  to  have  more  than  so 
much  life  in  any  one  field  of  consciousness;  and  if  this 
limit  is  nearly  reached,  by  way  of  absorption  in  some  appe- 
tite or  passion,  there  is,  of  course,  little  left  of  psychic 
energy  with  which  to  do  any  thinking.  And  thinking,  cul- 
minating in  judgment,  has  been  shown  to  be  necessary  to 
cognition.  Our  experience,  however,  might  seem  to  warrant 
us  in  saying,  not  so  much  that  rage,  or  grief,  or  jealousy, 
or  even  any  highly  emotional  form  of  ethical  and  religious 
and  sesthetical  feeling,  makes  knowledge  impossible,  as  that 
the  more  or  less  voluntary  refusal  to  think  makes  these 
forms  of  emotion  possible.  Rage,  etc.,  makes  a  man  blind 
intellectually ;  but,  conversely,  the  intellectually  blind  man 
falls  into  a  rage,  etc.  Nor  is  this  conclusion  the  result  of 
mere  juggling  with  terms.  The  man  of  narrow  mind  has 
less  room  in  his  mind  for  any  combination  of  the  .three 
aspects,  or  fundamental  forms,  of  all  mental  life;  he  can 
live  less  completely  and  largely  at  any  moment  of  time. 

An  animal  indulgence  of  the  intense  emotions  must  also 
be  recognized,  in  the  case  of  which  the  intellectual  elements 
sink  to  the  corresponding  grade  of  an  animal  consciousness. 
The  emotional  frenzy  of  the  human  animal  is  a  state  of 
consciousness  not  greatly  unlike  that  of  the  enraged  bull  or 
tiger,  the  jealous  dog,  the  panic-stricken  deer.  Then  the 
man  runs  amuck  at  the  objects  of  his  hate,  or  runs  pell-mell 
away  from  the  objects  of  his  dread.  The  division  of  the 
army  "  loses  its  head "  and  flees  amain ;  the  political  or 
ecclesiastical  party,  or  the  majority  of  the  community  "  go  it 
blind,"  as  men  say. 

Here,  however,  we  may  interpose  the  somewhat  startling 
but  by  no  means  impertinent  question:  Is  God,  then,  to  be 


KNOWLEDGE  AS  FEELING  AND  WILLING  165 

conceived  of  as  a  clear-cut,  cold  "logic-engine,"  without  any 
emotions  of  anger,  sympathy,  or  sorrow,  by  which  to  link 
him,  heart  to  heart,  with  the  blundering,  sorrowing,  and 
striving  children  of  men  ?  And  are  they  made  in  his  image 
only  in  so  far  as  they  can  "  think  his  thoughts  after  him  " 
without  any  chance  to  win  the  ability  to  pattern  their 
emotions,  too,  after  those  belonging  to  the  divine  life  ? 
Without  attempting  at  present  to  suggest  an  answer  to  this 
inquiry,  we  return  to  examine  more  closely  our  affective 
experiences  as  men.  And  here  we  recognize  the  indispen- 
sable cognitive  value  of  certain  strong  emotions.  Some 
truths  —  it  is  matter  of  common  observation  —  can  be  reached 
most  easily  and  readily  (if,  indeed,  they  can  be  reached  at 
all  otherwise)  through  the  medium  of  feeling.  To  love,  to 
hate,  to  long  for,  and  to  grieve  for,  —  these  are  exercises  of 
the  soul  without  experience  of  which  certain  sides  of 
reality,  and  certain  profound  truths  touching  the  nature 
of  reality,  can  never  be  apprehended  at  all.  In  the  experi- 
ence of  a  "grand  passion"  the  mind  not  infrequently  wins 
its  way,  in  brief  instants  of  time,  to  a  judgment  which  it 
would  take  long  to  reach  if  one  had  to  plod  along  the 
paths  of  inductive  or  demonstrative  reasoning.  For  that  is 
also  true  to  which  Browning  celebrates  the  way  in  his 
exhortation :  — 

"  So  you  ignore, 

So  you  make  perfect  the  present,  —  condense, 
In  a  rapture  of  rage,  for  perfection's  endowment, 
Thought  and  feeling  and  soul  and  sense." 

The  intimate  "connection"  of  feeling  with  knowledge  is, 
indeed,  a  matter  of  fact  which  no  student  of  the  human 
mind  would  think  of  denying.  But  a  matter-of-fact  con- 
nection between  the  two  so-called  faculties  of  emotion  and 
of  intellect  is  a  superficial  affair  in  comparison  with  the 
truth  which  we  are  desirous  of  enforcing.  This  truth  is, 
the  rather,  that  no  cognition  at  all  is  possible  without  the 


166          KNOWLEDGE  AS  FEELING  AND  WILLING 

presence  of  affective  and  emotional  factors  in  the  very  act 
of  cognition,  or  without  the  influence  of  such  factors  over 
the  nature  of  the  cognitive  process  itself.  To  know  is  to  feel 
as  well  as  to  think;  and  feeling  is  as  truly  an  indispen- 
sable "moment"  in,  or  aspect  of,  knowledge  as  are  those 
factors  which  our  analysis  assigns  to  intellectual  faculty. 
Nor  can  the  slightest  conception  be  formed  of  what  knowl- 
edge would  seem  like,  or  actually  be,  if  it  were  not  rich  also 
in  content  of  feeling.  The  illustration  of  this  psychological 
tenet,  which  will  subsequently  be  found  of  fundamental 
importance  for  epistemology,  needs  now  to  be  preceded  by 
reminding  ourselves  of  two  truths  respecting  the  nature  of 
all  feeling.  First,  then,  and  strictly  speaking,  the  actual 
nature  of  the  various  affective  phenomena  of  human  con- 
sciousness, quoad  affective,  cannot  be  construed  or  conveyed 
in  the  form  of  conceptions.  The  nature  of  feeling  is  in  being 
felt.  To  know  what  any  particular  form  of  feeling  is,  there 
is  no  other  way  than  the  self-conscious  envisagement  of  that 
form  of  feeling  in  one's  own  psychic  life.  To  know  what 
any  feeling  is  in  another  consciousness  can  be  accomplished 
only  when  in  some  way  —  perhaps,  indeed,  by  the  language 
of  feeling,  which  is  of  the  analogical  type  —  one's  own  con- 
sciousness is  definitively  determined  into  a  corresponding 
form  of  feeling. 

But,  second,  the  same  discriminating  consciousness  which 
is  necessary  to  every  self-conscious  state,  since  without 
thinking  we  cannot  know  our  own  states,  must  separate  and 
identify,  and  thus  recognize,  the  affective  factors,  or  the 
emotional  aspect,  of  the  cognitive  processes.  Thus  we 
become  able,  in  some  sort,  to  describe  and  faithfully  dis- 
course about  that  in  our  experience  which  cannot  be  put, 
strictly  speaking,  into  conceptual  terms.  Thus  much  of 
truth  there  is  in  Schopenhauer's  loose  way  of  interpret- 
ing consciousness  when  he  exhorts  us  about  as  follows: 
"  Would'st  know  what  feelings  of  thine  are,  and  what  those 


KNOWLEDGE   AS   FEELING  AND  WILLING          167 

of  other  men  are  like  ?  Then  look  within  thyself,  and, 
whatever  thou  findest  wholly  incapable  of  being  made  an 
object  of  conceptual  knowledge,  call  that  feeling;  regard  it 
carefully,  and  when  thou  seest  thy  fellows  giving  the  signs 
thou  wilt  learn  by  experience  to  recognize,  then  believe 
that  they,  too,  are  feeling  similarly." 

Human  feelings,  so  far  as  they  both  constitute  and  modify 
the  cognitive  processes,  may  be  somewhat  roughly  but  con- 
veniently divided  into  three  classes,  according  to  the  char- 
acter of  the  relations  which  they  sustain,  as  feelings,  to 
those  processes.  These  three  classes  we  will  call  the  im- 
pulsive, the  regulative,  and  the  integrating  —  leaving  the 
moaning  of  the  last  term  to  be  explained  later  on.  These 
are,  perhaps,  not  so  much  different  classes  of  feeling  as 
different  uses  of  the  feelings  in  the  complete  cognitive 
function. 

Without  that  varied  impulse  from  feeling,  —  which  does 
not  come  simply  as  an  external  push  that  ceases  before  the 
movement  of  the  cognitive  process  begins,  but  also  continues 
within  the  process  as  its  living  spring,  — this  cognitive 
process  itself  cannot  be  understood.  In  all  cognition,  it  is 
feeling  that  starts  and  keeps  in  motion  the  process  of  think- 
ing. Here  is  where  the  function  of  the  instinctive  impulses, 
the  natural  desires,  and  the  various  forms  of  the  sense  of 
need,  make  themselves  felt  as  an  ever  present  spur  to  the 
beginning  and  to  the  growth  of  knowledge.  It  is  as  a 
hungry  and  thirsty  and  therefore  venturesome  little  animal 
that  the  babe  starts  to  find  out  how  things  taste  and  smell 
and  feel ;  what,  in  brief,  they  are  good  for,  to  serve  the 
interests  of  his  own  feeling-full  and  strong  appetites  and 
sensations.  The  fundamental  uses  of  the  senses,  and  the 
important  practical  qualities  of  things  as  answering  to  these 
uses,  are  learned  only  in  this  way.  Nor  let  it  be  thought 
that  this  impulse  to  the  growing  process  of  the  primitive 
cognitions,  as  it  arises  in  the  various  forms  of  restless 


168          KNOWLEDGE  AS  FEELING  AND   WILLING 

desire  and  painful  need,  is  something  to  be  reckoned  with 
in  a  way  extraneous  to  the  growth  of  the  cognitions  them- 
selves. The  rather  is  it  true  that  the  first  description  of 
any  "Thing,"  that  which  the  thing  is  to  the  child,  can  be 
told  only  as  a  history  of  the  rise  and  fall,  the  swelling  and 
contracting,  of  confused  complexes  of  feelings  of  craving 
and  of  their  progressive  satisfaction,  together  with  more 
objective  sensations  which  are  getting  bound  together  into 
a  percept,  or  mental  image.  Take  the  feelings  out  of  this 
complex  process,  —  actually  abstract  them,  after  the  fashion 
in  which  the  psychologist  theoretically  abstracts  them,  — 
and  the  whole  experience  becomes  a  pale,  thin  affair  out  of 
which  no  cognition  of  a  Self  as  related  to  a  world  of  separate 
Things  could  ever  be  evolved. 

Nor  are  the  feelings  which  belong  to  the  soul  of  the  infant, 
and  have  reference  chiefly  to  other  selves,  rather  than  to 
things,  less  influential  in  arousing  and  giving  vital  impulse 
and  coloring  to  the  whole  life  of  cognition.  The  earliest 
"proofs"  of  the  existence  of  other  sentient  beings  are  laid 
chiefly  in  the  impulses  of  altruistic  feeling,  and  in  the  power 
these  impulses  have  over  the  mind  to  start  and  to  regulate 
the  act  of  cognition.  Moreover,  the  first  recognized  content 
of  any  other  self  than  myself  is  far  less  a  conception  than  it 
is  a  mixture  of  warm  and  interesting  feelings,  produced 
largely  under  the  psychological  principles  of  imitation  and 
suggestion,  and  connected  in  experience  with  certain  pro- 
jected sensations.  For  even  the  adult,  the  persistence  and 
obtrusive  presence  in  his  own  consciousness  of  these  de- 
veloped altruistic  emotions  is  the  impregnable  fortress 
within  him  to  which,  under  the  assaults  of  sceptical  ideal- 
ism, retreats  his  belief  in  the  extra-mental  existence  of 
his  fellowmen.  And  if  the  retroactive  shudder  before  a 
logical  solipsism  is  strongest  when  one  thinks  of  the  conse- 
quences of  denying  to  one's  self  a  knowledge  of  the  reality 
of  the  members  of  one's  own  family  or  friendly  circle,  one 


KNOWLEDGE  AS  FEELING  AND   WILLING          169 

is  only  carrying  out  in  adult  fashion  the  influences  of 
those  infantile  and  instinctive  feelings  which  first  revealed 
the  existence  of  the  same  beings  to  the  child.1 

Who  that  knows  anything  of  the  psychology  of  childhood 
can  doubt  that  the  impulse  to  attain  a  knowledge  of  other 
persons  is  chiefly  given  in  the  cravings  for  sympathy  and  in 
the  instinctive  exercise  of  sympathy?  Both  things  and 
persons  are  first  known  as  objects  of  interested  curiosity, 
which  may  become  instruments  of  pleasurable  or  painful 
feeling  to  the  child ;  but  persons  are  first  known  as  that  sort 
of  things  which  can  feel  with  the  child,  and  can  induce  it 
to  feel  with  them.  The  need  of  an  object  for  our  feelings 
of  sympathy  is  as  truly  a  human  need,  is  as  surely  determined 
to  create  something  for  its  own  satisfaction,  as  is  the  need  of 
an  object  which  shall  explain  any  other  form  of  our  experi- 
ence. Penetration  of  the  spear's  point  into  the  oaken  board 
or  between  the  joints  of  the  armor  in  its  search  for  the 
victim's  heart,  would  no  more  take  place  without  a  strong 
thrust  behind  the  shaft,  than  would  "penetration"  of  the 
existence  and  nature  in  reality  of  our  fellow-men  without 
the  push  of  this  passionate  interest  in  them.  Modern  psy- 
chology is  working  vigorously  with  the  principles  of  sugges- 
tion and  imitation  to  help  on  an  understanding  of  the 
origins  and  earliest  development  of  our  life  of  ideation, 
thought,  and  knowledge.  And  in  spite  of  needed  cautions 
against  overworking  these  principles,  it  is  accomplishing 
many  valuable  results  through  the  explanations  they  afford. 
But  without  the  impulsive  and  regulating  presence  of  the 
altruistic  feelings  which  always  accompany  these  principles 
in  the  real  life  of  the  mind,  neither  the  origins  nor  the 
development  of  intellectual  life  can  be  explained. 

Moreover,  special  forms  of  those  feelings  which  "  connect " 
us  with  our  fellows  are  indispensable  to  the  explanation  of 

1  See  the  criticism  of  M.  Flournoy's  position  in  the  author's  "  Philosophy  of 
Mind,"  pp.  28  f. 


170          KNOWLEDGE  AS  FEELING  AND  WILLING 

the  special  forms  of  cognition  which  arise  with  reference  to 
them.  For  example,  the  knowledge  of  men  as  actually 
linked  together  into  a  society,  with  common  interests  and 
inter-communicating  destinies,  requires  the  feeling  of  de- 
pendence. Here  may  be  noted  the  use  of  this  feeling  which 
has  been  made  by  some  writers  on  the  philosophy  of  religion 
as  leading  to  the  faith  in,  and  the  vision  of,  God.  The 
babe  against  its  mother's  breast  is  acquiring  an  unforgettable 
lesson,  chiefly  communicated  through  feeling,  in  its  actual 
dependence  on  other  existence  than  its  own,  for  well-being 
and  for  being  at  all.  How,  indeed,  should  he  ever  be  led 
to  know  that  other  being  is,  if  he  were  left  in  the  feeling 
of  his  own  self-sufficiency  ?  Of  course,  to  question  this  truth 
becomes  absurd  as  soon  as  we  understand  the  history  of  the 
origin  and  development  of  the  conception  of  Self.  For  this 
history  is  impossible  of  actual  accomplishment,  as  it  is 
impossible  of  description,  without  taking  both  self-feelings 
and  feelings  referent  to  other  selves  constantly  into  the 
account.  Especially  does  that  knowledge  on  which  depends 
the  entire  life  of  the  race,  its  propagation  and  continuance 
in  history,  and  the  whole  structure  of  the  family  and  the 
State,  require  for  its  achievement  and  explanation  the 
impulsive  and  regulative  action  of  special  forms  of  feeling. 
Indeed,  in  some  of  these  relations,  the  emotional  factors  so 
largely  predominate  over  those  of  ideation  and  judgment 
that  the  language  of  feeling  rather  than  of  intellect  best 
expresses  them.  Nor  is  it  without  a  profound  philosophical 
import  that  the  specialized  form  of  intercourse  between  the 
sexes  is,  in  the  Hebrew  and  other  languages,  described  in 
terms  of  cognition. 

But  it  is  even  more  important  to  notice  that  in  the  con- 
sciousness of  the  child  almost  exclusively,  and  in  the  con- 
sciousness of  the  adult  very  largely,  other  beings  than  Self 
are  known  only  representatively,  by  an  act  of  imagination 
which  projects  into  them  our  experiences  of  feeling  with 


KNOWLEDGE  AS  FEELING  AND  WILLING          171 

ourselves.  What  is  "  the  other  "  —  which  is  not  its  self  but 
is  another  self  —  to  the  consciousness  of  the  child?  Could 
language  accurately  define  the  actual  experience  of  the  child 
when  it  knows  the  animal,  or  the  mate,  with  which  it  plays, 
the  parent  or  the  nurse  that  tends  and  controls  it,  how 
would  such  definition  run  ?  Surely  not  in  terms  of  pure 
thinking  chiefly.  Almost  as  surely  not,  for  the  most  part,  in 
terms  of  ideation.  It  is  rather  a  certain  determinate  flow 
of  his  own  emotional  consciousness  which  defines  another 
sentient  being  to  the  consciousness  of  the  child.  For  it  the 
very  being  of  the  object  —  as  fact,  and  marked  off  qualita- 
tively from  other  beings  —  is  largely  a  compound  of  its  own 
centrifugally  determined  feelings.  The  dog  is  understood 
to  be  a  something  which  differs  from  that  other  thing,  a 
stone,  not  merely  in  color,  shape,  size,  and  mobility,  but 
also  and  chiefly  in  this :  it  feels  as  the  boy  feels,  —  hungry, 
thirsty,  hurt,  mad,  spiteful,  or  pleased,  glad,  friendly.  In- 
deed, a  description  of  the  process  of  cognition  can  no  more 
be  made  complete  while  neglecting  the  course  of  suggested, 
imitative,  and  sympathetic  feelings  than  while  overlooking 
the  succession  of  ideas  and  judgments  with  which  these  feel- 
ings are  fused.  Any  child  is  much  more  capable  of  under- 
standing its  parent  as  a  being  that,  in  all  the  simpler  forms 
of  feeling  with  which  it  has  itself  had  experience,  feels  as 
it  knows  itself  to  feel,  than  as  a  being  that  reasons  and 
judges  in  terms  familiar  to  itself.  And  in  how  much  of  all 
this  are  all  men  only  children !  Were  it  not  so,  indeed, 
human  beings  could  not  know  each  other  with  any  approach 
to  completeness,  or  with  any  prospect  of  realizing  some  good 
practical  purpose. 

In  this  connection  should  be  noticed  the  essential  effect 
upon  the  process  of  cognition  which  is  produced  by  the 
pleasurable  or  painful  tone  inseparable  from  most  of  our 
feelings.  The  reality  of  the  world,  both  of  things  and  of 
selves,  and  the  actuality  of  the  events  happening  in  this 


172          KNOWLEDGE  AS  FEELING  AND  WILLING 

world,  are  "  ground "  into  us  through  the  changes  in  our 
pleasure-pain  series  which  these  things  and  selves  produce. 
When  the  dog  makes  itself  known  to  the  teasing  boy  as  a 
something  that  feels  hurt  and  mad,  it  sends  home  to  the 
boy's  brain  and  heart  one  sure  item  of  knowledge  with  force- 
ful "tooth  and  claw."  Thus  the  boy  learns  his  truth  about 
the  animal,  and  ceases  from  further  critical  and  sceptical 
experimentation  in  the  same  direction.  In  the  future, 
doubts  do  not  arise,  —  that  the  dog  really  is,  and  that  the  boy 
knows  what  the  dog  is.  Severely  idealistic  philosophers 
have  always  jeered  at  the  common-sense  but  antiquated 
doctor  who  refuted  idealism  with  blows  from  his  staff. 
And,  indeed,  there  is  no  logical  "  argument "  in  blows. 
Perhaps  such  idealism  can  never  be  refuted  if  it  chooses  to 
satisfy  itself  with  what  are  called  "mere"  arguments.  But 
all  arguments  go  back  to  the  actual  facts  of  our  manifold 
experience ;  however  they  may  fly  abroad  in  regions  of  thin 
air  for  many  a  splendid  hour,  if  they  wish  to  get  general 
acceptance  they  must  alight  again  upon  the  grounds  of 
experience,  and  face  the  facts  of  daily  life.  Now  the  uni- 
versal fact  of  daily  experience  is  that  mere  argument  does 
not  result  in  the  cognition  which  affirms  the  trans-subjective 
reality  of  its  object.  But  the  world  of  things  is  actually 
known  as  hurting  us  most  awfully  and  much  of  the  time; 
and  for  the  rest  of  the  time,  as  giving  to  us  more  or  less  of 
pleasure.  Now  I  do  not  like  that  pain;  I  hate  it;  and  I 
will  not  have  it  in  my  consciousness.  By  a  prompt,  instinc- 
tive, and  defensive  movement,  into  which  little  of  thought 
or  of  reasoning  enters,  my  motor  organism  reacts  against  it; 
then  I  get  hurt  again  and  even  more  badly.  What  now  must 
this  experience  mean  to  me  as  evincing  the  nature  of  the 
object  of  cognition  ?  The  answer  which  springs  from  the  most 
hidden  and  deepest  roots  of  consciousness,  as  a  forthputting 
of  a  judgment  that  is  born  in  the  affective  rather  than  the 
intellective  nature,  affirms:  My  object  is  not  merely  my 


KNOWLEDGE  AS  FEELING  AND   WILLING          173 

idea.  That  which  I  so  hate,  and  will  not,  that  which  is  so 
often  opposing  and  thwarting  my  will,  and  making  all  my 
sensibilities  quiver  with  anguish,  is  not  at  one  with  me. 
It  is  my  other,  and  not  my  self.  It  is  not  my  nature  to  have 
it  so;  it  is  the  nature  of  things  and  of  other  selves  that  it 
is  so. 

Further  confirmation  and  illustration  of  the  necessary  part 
which  this  class  of  feelings  take  in  all  human  cognition 
will  be  offered  when  we  come  to  consider  the  terms  on 
which  selves  and  things  get  differentiated  in  the  develop- 
ment of  the  intellectual  life. 

There  is  no  need  to  dwell  in  this  connection  upon  the 
well-known  influence  which  comes  to  the  development  of 
knowledge  in  the  individual  and  in  the  race  from  the  intel- 
lectual feeling  of  curiosity.  This  feeling  is,  indeed,  to  be 
recognized  as  belonging  to  human  nature  in  general,  and  as 
affording  the  motif  for  the  ordinary,  as  well  as  for  the  most 
splendid  acquisitions  of  knowledge.  Under  its  influence 
the  child  searches  into  the  nature  and  uses  of  things,  and  so 
builds  up  the  experience  which  is  necessary  to  its  own  safety 
and  to  its  very  life.  Of  its  intensity  in  certain  cases 
Augustine  bore  witness  when  he  declared,  "My  soul  is  on 
fire  to  know."  Plato  made  a  certain  divine  Eros  the  only 
avenue  to  philosophic  cognition;  and  the  Prussian  queen 
affirmed  her  desire  to  die  because  then  she  should  surely 
know  the  things  as  to  the  truth  of  which  even  Leibnitz  could 
not  tell  her. 

There  is,  however,  another  important  group  of  feelings 
concerned  in  all  our  cognitive  processes,  whose  function  is 
mainly  regulative  of  these  processes  themselves.  This  regu- 
lative office  is  performed  by  certain  logical  feelings  as  well 
as  by  the  ethical  and  the  aesthetical.  In  matters  of  art  the 
fact  is  almost  universally  recognized  that  feeling  takes  the 
lead  of  judgment.  The  pronouncement  primarily  made  in 
an  affection  with  a  peculiar  feeling-tone  is  the  basis  for  the 


174          KNOWLEDGE  AS  FEELING  AND  WILLING 

judgment  affirming  a  completed  act  of  cognition.  Nor  will 
it  avail  to  object  that  we  are  here  dealing  with  matters  of 
mere  opinion  rather  than  of  genuine  cognition.  The  Kennen 
of  the  artist,  as  well  as  the  Wissen  of  the  man  of  science,  is 
a  form  of  knowledge;  and  the  truth  of  the  world  of  real 
beings  and  actual  relations  comes  through  the  conscious 
attitudes  toward  it  of  the  former,  perhaps  quite  as  much  as 
of  the  latter.  Although,  also,  there  is  a  broad  shadowy 
region  in  all  sesthetical  matters,  where  opinion  or  belief 
rather  than  knowledge  is  all  that  can  be  claimed,  some 
aesthetical  judgments,  at  least,  are  affirmative  of  sure  posi- 
tions taken  by  the  process  of  cognition.  For  example,  I  am 
listening  to  a  learner  on  the  violin  who,  in  an  adjoining 
room,  is  running  over  scales,  sometimes  correctly  but  some- 
times striking  a  tone  which  I  immediately  judge  incorrect. 
By  what  means  do  I  judge  this  tone  to  be  out  of  place ;  or 
rather,  what  is  the  meaning  of  the  judgment,  "  It  is  incor- 
rect," as  expressive  of  actual  facts  of  consciousness?  Is  it 
not  chiefly  this,  that  the  feelings  of  expectation  with  which 
I  awaited  the  next  tone  in  the  succession  have  been  disap- 
pointed by  the  actual  feelings  which  have  taken  possession 
of  my  consciousness  ?  The  feeling,  as  such,  is  disagreeable, 
and  this  quality  belongs  to  my  subjective  state  of  an  affec- 
tive kind;  the  feeling  is  not  agreeable,  it  is  painful.  But 
I  judge  the  sensation  of  musical  sound  to  be  wrongly  placed 
in  the  series,  — as  much  out  of  place  as  though  the  child,  in 
learning  to  count,  had  offered  the  series  1,  2,  3,  7  as  an 
example  of  correct  counting.  Besides  the  disagreeableness 
of  the  feeling  subjectively  considered,  there  is  in  my  con- 
sciousness —  what  is  not  the  same  thing,  but  has  a  necessary 
objective  reference  —  a  feeling  of  dissonance,  of  the  disa- 
greement of  this  sound  with  the  one  which  should  occur  at 
its  place  in  the  series.  The  feeling  is  not  the  product  of 
the  judgment;  but  the  judgment  is  the  expression  of  the 
feeling. 


KNOWLEDGE  AS  FEELING  AND  WILLING         175 

Now  in  all  such  cases  as  the  foregoing  it  may  be  argued 
that  the  judgment  itself  has  no  objective  reference  or  objec- 
tive value.  Its  total  import  should,  therefore,  be  stated  as 
follows :  "  I  am  disagreeably  affected  by  this  tone  at  this  place 
in  the  series;  and,  therefore,  I  conclude  that  the  series  is 
not  a  good,  correct  —  that  is,  a  pleasant  —  series. "  But 
such  an  account  of  this  characteristic  consciousness  does  not 
recognize  all  the  actual  facts  in  the  case.  For  I  am  as  sure 
that  I  am  proclaiming  a  truth  to  which  other  properly  con- 
stituted natures  will  immediately  and  unfailingly  give  assent, 
when  I  make  this  quasi -sestlietica].  judgment,  as  when  I  assert 
that  the  violin  is  being  played  in  the  next  room.  Indeed,  I 
am  much  surer  of  the  objective  validity  of  my  judgment  in 
affirming  the  discord  than  of  my  judgment  in  localizing  the 
origin  of  the  sound.  Let  it  be  reaffirmed  that,  after  all, 
the  judgment  must  be  taken  as  purely  relative  to  my  con- 
sciousness, merely  relative,  and  I  may  at  once  unhesitat- 
ingly deny  that  this  is  so.  The  judgment  cannot  be  so 
taken,  because  that  is  not  what  the  judgment  means. 
It  means  to  affirm  an  act  of  cognition,  good  for  myself  and 
for  others  also.  It  is  not,  indeed,  good  for  those  who  are 
wholly  or  partially  tone-deaf;  it  is  not  even  good,  as  yet,  for 
the  child  who  is  unconsciously  making  the  incorrect  tone  so 
disagreeable  to  me.  But  the  reply  is  ready :  the  same  thing 
is  true  of  all  our  judgments  of  things  as  obtained  by  sense- 
perception.  The  child  would  not  notice  different  shades  of 
color  easily  discernible  by  the  trained  adult ;  it  would  not  be 
offended  by  disharmonies  of  tone-colors  quite  objectionable 
to  the  artist's  eye.  The  simple  fact  is  that  this  judgment, 
like  every  other  judgment  which  undertakes  to  affirm  objec- 
tive truth,  postulates  a  common  nature  to  which  a  final 
appeal  may  be  made.  And  aesthetical  judgment  may  thus 
be  even  more  thoroughly  objective  than  one  affirming  the 
sensuous  agreeableness  or  disagreeableness  of  things.  One 
man  may  not  like  olives,  and  another  may  like  them;  but 


176          KNOWLEDGE  AS  FEELING  AND  WILLING 

what  of  that  ?  It  is  mere  matter  of  happen-so  of  taste ;  and 
they  should  not  quarrel  over  it.  If,  however,  you  judge  that 
incorrect  tone  to  be  correct,  I  judge  you  to  be  wanting  in 
something  that  belongs  to  every  rightly  formed  and  well- 
developed  consciousness.  You  are  for  the  present  quite 
shut  out  from  one  kind  of  truth;  and  this  is  because  you 
cannot  feel  the  difference  between  the  true  and  the  false  in 
respect  of  this  particular  standard  of  judgment. 

Now  it  belongs  to  the  branch  of  philosophy  called  aesthetics 
to  investigate  the  origin  and  character,  and  to  defend  the 
validity  of  judgments  respecting  the  beautiful  in  nature  and 
in  art.  But  whatever  views  one  espouses  in  this  branch  of 
philosophy,  they  do  not  affect  the  truth  of  the  epistemologi- 
cal  principle  for  which  we  are  now  contending.  This  truth 
is  the  immediate  dependence  of  the  judgment  affirming  an 
act  of  cognition  upon  the  feeling,  for  its  rule.  As  has 
already  been  said,  the  cognitive  judgment  is  affirmative  of 
objective  validity  for  that  which  has  just  been  experienced 
in  the  succession  of  feelings.  The  judgment  says  not,  "I 
know  that  I  feel;"  or,  "I  feel  that  you  ought  to  feel  with 
me. "  The  judgment  says,  "  I  know  that  it  is  so. "  But  if 
we  ask  for  the  cause  rather  than  the  grounds  of  the  judg- 
ment, we  find  them  to  be :  I  felt  it  to  be  so.  The  feeling 
was  not  separated  from  the  act  of  cognition;  it  constituted 
the  important  and  regulating  part  of  the  cognition.  The 
"stuff"  of  the  judgment  was  a  certain  succession  of  qualita- 
tively determined  and  obscurely  localized  sensations  of 
sound ;  its  spirit  and  life,  its  affirmative  or  negative  char- 
acter as  agreeing  or  disagreeing  with  a  certain  ideal  stand- 
ard, consisted  in  a  definite  quality  and  direction  of  the 
affective  consciousness. 

So  simple  an  example  has  been  dwelt  upon  with  what 
may  seem  too  insistent  minuteness,  because  it  may  be  con- 
sidered as  typical  of  the  primary  human  aesthetical  con- 
sciousness in  general.  And  to  say  "  sesthetical  consciousness  " 


KNOWLEDGE  AS  FEELING  AND  WILLING          177 

is  to  cover  a  much  larger  and  more  important  part  of  the 
actual  life  of  the  mind  than  is  ordinarily  supposed.  How 
the  higher  aesthetical  and  ethical  feelings  enter  into  and 
regulate  all  our  cognitive  processes  will  be  made  the  subject 
of  inquiry  in  a  separate  chapter.  But  there  is  much  of  the 
daily  intercourse  of  men,  with  its  system  of  practical  cogni- 
tions and  its  recognition  of  what  are  called  "the  proprieties  " 
of  life,  that  is  really,  though  half-consciously,  regulated  by 
quasi-seathetical  feelings.  Indeed,  these  feelings  so  blend 
with,  or  pass  over  into  the  ethical  and  the  logical  that  it 
becomes  quite  impossible  to  consider  the  two  classes  of 
affective  factors  apart.  The  doctrine  of  "  tact "  is  a  neglected 
but  much  needed  portion  of  psychology.  It  is  chiefly  by 
what  is  called  tact,  as  all  are  agreed,  that  certain  persons 
know  what  things  are  and  how  to  handle  them,  —  all  by  a 
leap,  and  without  any  obvious  exercise  of  the  faculty  of 
thought  and  reasoning,  as  it  were.  He  who  can  find  the 
explanation  of  the  boy  Mozart,  playing  the  grand  organ  on 
the  first  time  of  his  encounter  with  it,  by  any  theory  as  to  a 
previous  inheritance  or  development  of  the  merely  intel- 
lectual faculties,  must  be  easily  satisfied  with  his  psycho- 
logical analyses.  To  employ  such  words  as  "  genius  "  for 
the  human  artist,  and  "  instinct "  for  the  animal  artist  —  for 
the  beetle,  or  the  spider,  or  the  bee  —  is  only  to  cover  up 
ignorance  instead  of  expressing  knowledge.  Nor  can  the 
astute  observer  sympathize  with  Hartmann,  who,  in  his 
theory  of  the  Unconscious,  brings  together  innumerable  facts 
of  different  orders  as  though  the  mere  mention  of  a  great 
number  of  cases  proved  his  view  of  the  real  explanation 
of  any  case.  But  in  our  own  case,  as  men,  we  know  by 
self-consciousness  that  many  of  our  most  assured  and 
valuable  cognitions  respecting  the  nature  of  things  and  of 
other  selves  are  given  chiefly  in  terms  of  feeling.  Not 
always,  indeed,  but  far  too  frequently  to  make  it  safe  for 
us  to  despise  this  means  of  cognition,  the  felt  truth  turns 

12 


178          KNOWLEDGE  AS  FEELING  AND  WILLING 

out,  as  tested  by  subsequent  experience,  to  be  the  truth 
indeed. 

In  smaller  degree,  and  in  somewhat  but  not  in  essentially 
different  manner,  does  ethical  feeling  enter  into  all  human 
judgments  on  matters  of  the  morally  right  and  the  morally 
wrong  in  conduct.  Reasons  for  the  important  differences 
between  sesthetical  and  ethical  judgments  are  historical 
rather  than  due  to  the  inherent  nature  of  the  faculty  of  cog- 
nition; and  they  are  chiefly  the  two  following.  In  the  evo- 
lution of  morals  the  more  generally  accepted  principles  of 
judgment  have  been  embodied  in  the  forms  of  written  and 
unwritten  law,  of  hereditary  customs,  institutions,  and, 
indeed,  of  the  total  environment  of  the  individual  man. 
Matters  of  sesthetical  judgment  are  much  more  fluid  than 
are  matters  of  ethical  judgment.  The  total  constitution  of 
society  forms  rules,  or  dictates,  to  which  cognition  must 
conform  to  a  greater  extent  in  conduct  than  in  art.  But 
this  difference  is  connected  with  another;  and  out  of  the 
latter  difference  the  former  largely  has  its  origin  and  sources 
of  growth.  The  consequences  of  wrong  judgment,  or  of  imper- 
fect knowledge,  in  respect  of  our  moral  action  are  much  more 
manifest  and  impressive  than  in  respect  of  what  is  merely 
aesthetically  correct  or  incorrect.  Hence  it  is  much  easier 
to  bring  one's  knowledge  of  the  ethically  right  or  wrong  into 
conscious  connection  with  recognized  grounds  upon  which  it 
may  be  left  to  repose,  to  argue  about  it,  and  to  teach  reasons 
for  it  to  others,  than  to  deal  in  similar  fashion  with  one's 
knowledge  of  the  beautiful  or  the  ugly.  A  high  degree  of 
Kennen  in  conduct  is  "  wisdom ; "  but  in  art  it  is  "  genius  " 
or  "talent."  A  great  deficiency  of  knowledge  in  matters  of 
conduct  seems  monstrous  and  inhuman;  but  a  correspond- 
ingly great  deficiency  of  knowledge  in  aasthetical  matters 
makes  the  rude  man  or  the  boor. 

These  differences,  however,  do  not  affect  the  general 
principle  that  judgments  in  matters  of  conduct  rest  more 


KNOWLEDGE  AS  FEELING  AND  WILLING          179 

upon  a  basis  of  feeling  than  upon  a  basis  of  thinking;  and 
this  in  such  a  way  that  the  judgments  themselves  affirm 
the  mere  fact  of  feeling  rather  than  the  intellectual  ground 
of  the  feeling.  In  the  conduct  of  the  multitude,  of  young 
children,  and  in  much  of  the  conduct  of  all  classes  of 
persons,  the  whole  character  and  content  of  the  stream  of 
consciousness  may  as  well  be  expressed  by  saying,  "  I  feel 
I  ought"  (or  ought  not)  as  by  saying:  "I  knoiv  that  it  is 
right "  (or  wrong).  A  study  of  the  moral  nature  and  de- 
velopment of  man,  of  the  human  mental  life  as  fitted  for 
conduct,  shows  that  it  is  only  the  feelings  of  "  oughtness  " 
and  of  "approbation"  which  are  the  unique  and  primal 
ethical  factors.  On  the  basis  of  these  feelings,  which  spring 
from  the  very  depths  of  the  soul,  as  they  are  called  out  and 
connected  by  the  environment  with  certain  modes  of  motor 
activity,  the  current  system  of  ethical  judgments  is  framed. 
The  placing  of  these  judgments  by  the  individual  on  recog- 
nized grounds,  whether  they  are  laid  in  the  anticipated  con- 
sequences of  the  conduct,  or  in  some  conception  of  a  law  or 
of  an  ideal  personality,  is  a  secondary  and  later  affair.  And 
not  infrequently  the  original  forms  of  feeling  linger  strong 
in  the  community,  or  die  hard  only  after  antagonistic 
secondary  judgments  have  for  some  time  been  formally 
accepted  as  the  "  rational  "  code.  Then  occurs  that  conflict, 
so  interesting  to  psychology  and  epistemology,  which  is  due 
to  the  fact  that  moral  feeling  judges  the  same  thing  wrong 
which  reasoning  on  grounds  judges  to  be  right;  or  vice  versa. 
One  man's  "  bad  conscience  "  may  then  appear  in  the  form  of 
perverse  feeling,  and  another's  in  the  form  of  insufficient 
reasoning.  Then,  not  only  do  the  "  men  of  feeling  "  and  the 
"  men  of  cool  judgment "  accuse  each  other  of  bad  character 
and  bad  conduct;  but  even  in  the  same  man's  breast,  feeling 
and  reason  fight  it  out  to  get  possession  of  the  judgment, 
which,  in  this  case,  however,  never  seems  quite  to  reach  a 
satisfactory  determination.  For  men  need  to  feel  satisfied, 


180          KNOWLEDGE  AS  FEELING  AND   WILLING 

as  well  as  to  reason  satisfactorily,  in  order  most  assuredly  to 
affirm  I  know  —  the  truth  or  falsehood  of  a  moral  judgment. 
This  curious  conflict  between  feeling  and  intellect  to  get 
control  of  judgment  will  be  observed  in  other  connections. 
It  is  frequent  and  forceful  in  cognitions  of  the  ethical 
class. 

Objections  may  be  urged,  however,  against  the  use  of  the 
word  "  knowledge  "  as  applicable  to  matters  aesthetical  and 
ethical.  Properly  and  quite  strictly  speaking,  ought  one 
not  to  say  that  these  are  matters  of  opinion  rather  than  of 
knowledge  ?  To  this  inquiry  the  full  and  satisfactory  answer 
requires  an  examination  of  the  grounds  of  certitude,  of  the 
means  of  knowing  truth  from  error,  and  of  the  propriety  of 
speaking  of  degrees  in  cognition.  Postponing  the  discus- 
sion of  these  subjects,  we  turn  our  attention  to  another  class 
of  feelings  against  which  the  same  objection  cannot  be  raised. 
Reference  now  is  made  to  the  so-called  "  logical "  feelings. 
Thorough  psychological  analysis  shows  that  there  is  not  a 
single  process  of  thought  which  does  not  have  its  affective 
as  well  as  its  intellective  aspect.  Without  the  former 
no  thought-process  would  bring  us  to  the  truth.  I  think, 
and,  finally,  I  know:  examined  in  one  aspect,  this  simply 
means  that  a  certain  series  of  ideas  and  judgments,  more  or 
less  supported  (it  is  probable)  by  a  frame-work  of  language, 
determines  itself  in  my  stream  of  consciousness.  While  the 
series  is  passing,  or  on  reviewing  it  by  repeating  it  more 
carefully,  I  discern  other  relations  of  consistency  or  incon- 
sistency between  the  ideas  and  judgments ;  and  at  the  end  of 
the  series,  I  pass  judgment  in  such  final  form  as  to  say, 
"I  know."  Examined  in  another  aspect,  this  same  expe- 
rience means  that  I  am  doing  something,  am  voluntarily  and 
definitively  directing  the  stream  of  my  own  consciousness 
toward  a  desired  end.  But  examined  in  yet  another  aspect, 
the  same  series  of  conscious  states  means  that  I  am  feeling 
myself  as  being  modified  by  the  relations  toward  one  another 


KNOWLEDGE   AS  FEELING  AND  WILLING          181 

of  my  own  ideas  and  judgments.  I  am  myself  affected  by 
that  which  I  actively  effect  in  respect  of  the  connection, 
and  the  character  of  the  flow  into  each  other,  of  my  train 
of  conscious  states.  The  feeling  of  the  intellectual  pro- 
cesses, whether  in  sense-perception  or  in  self-consciousness, 
or  in  the  remoter  reasonings  about  things  and  selves,  is 
a  constant  accompaniment  of  all  these  processes.  It  is  not 
merely  an  accompaniment;  it  is  also  a  regulative  factor  in 
the  same  processes.  It  is  not  a  simple,  dumb  companion 
in  the  journey  from  start  to  finish ;  but  from  start  to  finish, 
this  "feeling  of"  the  thought-movement  is  also  a  guide 
to  the  movement  of  thought. 

Consider  any  of  the  fundamental  exercises  of  thinking 
faculty,  —  for  example,  such  activity  of  discriminating  con- 
sciousness as  is  necessary  for  the  accurate  perception  of 
anything.  Here  thinking,  as  terminating  in  cognition,  is 
suffused  with,  and  directed  by,  affective  factors  that  accom- 
pany it  all  the  way  through.  The  feeling  of  pleased  familiar- 
ity, which  is  the  affective  factor  in  all  recognition,  is  a  part 
of  the  intellectual  process  of  assimilation;  the  feeling  of 
perplexity,  in  which  the  mind  hangs  while  "making  up" 
itself,  over  the  particular  object's  likeness  or  unlikeness  to 
some  class  of  objects  previously  cognized,  is  a  part  of  the 
intellectual  process  of  criticism;  the  feeling  of  shock  and 
slight  repugnance,  in  all  appreciation  of  the  unlike  or  of 
the  contrary,  is  the  emotional  element  in  the  intellectual 
process  of  differentiation.  In  all  these  and  similar  cases  of 
intellectual  activity  the  feelings  are  important  and  influen- 
tial guides  to  the  final  judgment.  Such  figurative  assertions 
as  follow  are,  then,  true  to  the  facts  of  consciousness:  The 
feeling  of  recognition  shows  the  mind  what  it  shall  judge  to 
be  similar  or  the  same ;  the  feeling  of  uncertainty  compels 
the  mind  to  the  suspension  of  judgment;  the  feeling  of  dif- 
ference induces  the  mind  to  distinguish  and  to  refuse  to 
judge,  under  a  common  term.  In  the  first  case  feeling  is 


182          KNOWLEDGE  AS  FEELING  AND  WILLING 

satisfied  only  if  we  judge,  "  It  is  this ; "  in  the  second  case, 
only  if  we  judge,  "  I  do  not  know  what  it  is ; "  but  in  the 
third  case,  only  if  we  judge,  "It  is  not  that."  It  is  under 
the  potent  influence  of  these  affective  regulce  that  the  forma- 
tion and  growth  of  a  system  of  cognitions  takes  place. 
Things  are  bound  together  by  ties  of  common  feeling,  or 
held  apart  by  feelings  of  repugnance.  But  about  some 
things  we  should  not  feel  right,  whether  we  put  them  into 
the  class  A  or  into  the  class  non-A.  In  such  cases  it  is  vain 
to  assure  the  wise  man  that,  according  to  invincible  logical 
principle,  everything  must  belong  with  either  A  or  non-A. 
He  knows  of  the  logical  principle;  but  what  he  does  not 
know  is,  to  which  of  these  two  classes  this  particular  X 
belongs.  The  grounds  of  his  refusal  to  judge  he  can  also 
state,  at  least  with  a  partial  satisfaction.  But  what  is  the 
meaning  of  the  other  side  of  every  declaration  of  doubt  ? 
Is  it  not  this,  that  one  feels  one's  self  to  be  "not  satisfied" 
with  one's  grounds  of  judgment?  If  one  could  only  "feel 
sure "  of  them,  then,  etc.  What,  finally,  are  satisfaction 
per  se  and  non-satisfaction  per  «e,  but  forms  of  affective 
consciousness  ?  To  suppose  that  man's  intellectual  activity 
could  free  itself  from  the  feelings  which  belong  to  the  pro- 
cesses of  mental  assimilation,  differentiation,  and  criticism, 
and  yet  retain  its  logical  effectiveness  is  almost  as  foolish 
as  to  suppose  that  the  bones  and  sinews  of  the  bird  could 
fly  if  there  were  no  stirring  or  guiding  of  motive  interior  to 
the  mechanism. 

This  doctrine  of  a  regulative  influence  for  the  affective 
elements  of  cognition  applies  to  sense-perception,  to  self- 
consciousness,  and  also  to  extended  processes  of  reasoning. 
Our  perception  of  anything  by  sight,  by  touch,  and  by  any 
or  by  all  of  the  senses,  is  never  an  affair  merely  of  being 
passively  impressed  with  the  image  of  an  external  object; 
nor  is  it  an  activity  of  mere  thinking  and  of  the  projection 
of  our  thoughts  into  a  thought-produced  space.  That  when 


KNOWLEDGE  AS   FEELING   AND  WILLING          183 

I  see  the  tree  over  yonder,  the  Ego  is  not  merely  taking  the 
place  of  the  sensitive  plate  in  a  kind  of  nervous  camera,  no 
longer  needs  statement  for  the  student  of  scientific  psy- 
chology. But  neither  can  my  perception  of  the  existence  or 
character  of  the  object  be  described  and  explained  on  the 
theory  of  its  being  a  mere  object  of  my  thought.  How  the 
reality  of  my  object  for  me  (that  it  is)  depends  on  a  feeling 
in  me,  may  well  be  made  a  separate  task  for  analysis  and 
critical  discussion.  Here  Schopenhauer's  sharp  criticism 
of  Kant  for  dismissing  the  whole  affair  with  the  sentence, 
"Objects  are  given  to  us  through  our  sensibility,"  is  not 
without  justification.  But,  furthermore,  precisely  what  the 
object  of  perception  is,  can  never  be  considered  as  a  question 
either  for  mere  sensation  or  for  pure  thinking  to  decide. 
The  resultant  of  the  active  discrimination,  however  promptly 
rendered,  depends  also  on  the  regulative  function  of  the 
logical  feelings. 

In  this  connection  we  note  again  how  the  feeling-full  and 
active  character  of  the  cognitive  processes  makes  them  to  be 
truly  cognitive,  by  preventing  them  from  being  regarded  as 
purely  subjective  processes,  whether  of  sensation,  ideation, 
or  thought,  and  by  enforcing  and  making  vital,  as  it  were, 
their  trans-subjective  implications.  To  speak  of  the  object 
of  perception,  Kantian  fashion,  as  a  "  thought-object "  is  to 
hypostasize  one  abstract  aspect  of  consciousness.  Purely 
thinking  consciousness  is  itself  an  abstraction ;  there  is  no 
such  subjective  reality  anywhere  to  be  found.  And  to  speak 
of  the  existence  or  being  of  any  actual  concrete  object  of  per- 
ception as  merely  object  of  consciousness,  or  merely  thought- 
object,  is  to  be  false  to  fact.  "For  being  is  in  no  wise  a 
constituent  of  an  idea;  it  is  experienced,  felt,  lived,  not 
ideated  or  thought."  J 

In  all  such  knowledge  as  is  reached  through  the  mediation 
of  trains  of  associated  ideas,  or  of  more  carefully  selected 

1  Riehl,  Der  Philosophische  Kriticismns,  II.,  ii.,  pp.  142  f. 


184          KNOWLEDGE  AS  FEELING  AND  WILLING 

judgments  arranged  in  series  that  correspond  to  the  laws  of 
logical  thinking,  our  feeling  of  these  processes  is  an  impor- 
tant factor  in  the  processes  themselves.  If  those  funda- 
mental principles  of  all  reasoning,  — the  so-called  principles 
of  Identity  and  of  Sufficient  Reason — without  which  we 
cannot  even  conceive  of  reasoning  at  all,  and  in  conscious 
violation  of  which  no  processes  of  reasoning,  however  false 
or  inconclusive,  can  be  conducted,  are  brought  to  the  last  test 
of  their  value,  in  what  does  this  test  consist  ?  Must  not  this 
question  be  answered  by  saying :  "  In  the  invincible  character 
of  the  feeling  with  which  all  'men  affirm  them,  and  the 
unconquerable  repugnance  with  which  any  proposal  to  abro- 
gate them  is  universally  met "  ?  For  argument  has  here 
arrived  at  a  stage  where  reasoning  can  decide  nothing. 
Reasoning  enters  into  the  arena  only  when  the  particular 
application  of  these  principles  of  all  reasoning  is  the  matter 
of  contest.  I  can  perhaps  throw  some  clear,  cold  light  upon 
the  disputed  question  of  the  identity  of  a  particular  A  and 
a  particular  B.  I  can  illuminate  my  own  mind  and  the 
minds  of  others,  perhaps,  as  to  whether  the  accepted  judg- 
ment "A  is  B"  warrants  the  further  judgment,  " A  is  also 
C. "  But  if  that  principle  which  books  of  logic  sometimes 
symbolize  by  writing,  "  All  A  is  A  "  be  called  in  question ; 
or  that  other  principle  on  the  basis  of  which  it  is  argued 
that  "If  all  A  is  B  and  C  is  -4,  then  C  is  also  .5,"  —  why, 
then  what  can  reasoning  do  about  it  ?  For  the  question  now 
is  whether  consistency  and  logic  and  reason  themselves 
shall  be  the  court  of  appeal  on  the  part  of  all  would-be 
reasoners.  You  and  I  have  nothing  but  our  feelings  —  both 
of  the  potency  and  beauty  of  our  position  of  trust,  and  of  the 
impotency  and  ugliness  of  the  position  of  absurd  distrust  — 
to  which  we  can  appeal.  Indeed,  it  is  the  loss  of  sensitive- 
ness to  these  feelings  which  chiefly  characterizes  an  utter 
lapse  from  the  level  of  rational  human  nature.  He  who 
cannot  feel  these  so-called  logical  principles  as  true  and  of 


KNOWLEDGE  AS  FEELING  AND  WILLING          185 

inestimable  value  is  a  lost  man.  His  soul  has  no  reason. 
It  may  be  a  principle  of  psychic  life,  of  some  sort  of  mock 
intelligence ;  but  it  has  no  longer  the  semblance  of  a  rational 
human  being.  Its  affective  core  is  gone. 

The  regulative  influences  and  values  of  the  feelings  which 
accompany  all  processes  of  ratiocination  might  be  illustrated 
in  almost  endless  detail.  And  these  illustrations  might  be 
drawn  from  all  our  work-a-day  experiences.  But  for  this 
very  reason  little  illustration  is  needed.  It  will  be  helpful, 
however,  to  notice  how  the  trains  of  associated  ideas  along 
the  levels  where  comparatively  little  clear-thoughted  judg- 
ment occurs  are  guided  by  their  affective  accompaniments. 
Sometimes  this  guidance  brings  the  mind  out  upon  solid 
grounds  of  verity ;  sometimes  it  leads  the  mind  into  quag- 
mires and  spongy  places  of  doubt  and  error.  Who  has  not 
felt,  on  returning  home  from  market,  shop,  or  study,  as 
though  his  memory  had  lapsed  or  gone  wrong  on  some  par- 
ticular point ;  but,  on  thinking  it  over,  has  judged  this  affec- 
tive consciousness  to  be  misguiding,  —  only,  perhaps,  to  find 
subsequently  that  feeling  was  the  truer  indication  of  the 
fact  ?  In  listening  to  the  discourse  of  others,  upon  failure 
to  catch  for  thought  the  exact  points  and  clear-cut  thread  of 
the  argument,  how  potent  are  the  feelings  of  satisfaction  or 
dissatisfaction  that  arise  from  the  most  obscure  depths  of 
the  soul,  to  determine  our  mental  attitudes  toward  the  various 
judgments  which  mark  the  steps  of  the  argument  ? 

Nor  are  such  experiences  to  be  confined  to  the  sphere  of 
mere  opinion  or  belief,  where  what  is  called  "prejudice" 
exercises  its  most  potent  influence.  How  very  restricted  is 
the  sphere  within  which  absolute  certainty  can  be  attained, 
both  as  to  the  "  that "  and  the  "  what "  of  the  object  of  cog- 
nition, will  appear  later  on.  Doubtless  all  manner  of  feel- 
ings of  interest  or  of  indifference  influence  men  to  erroneous 
opinions  and  to  false  beliefs;  or  even  to  substitute  judg- 
ments formed  under  such  influences  for  assured  knowledge. 


186  KNOWLEDGE   AS  FEELING   AND   WILLING 

But  neither  of  these  considerations  changes  the  nature  or 
lowers  the  value  of  the  truth  we  are  enforcing.  The  feel- 
ings which  belong  by  virtue  of  the  mind's  constitution  to 
its  logical  processes  are  themselves  influential  factors  in  deter- 
mining the  course  and  the  conclusion  of  those  processes. 
One  would  otherwise  no  more  know  how  to  hit  the  mark  of 
truth,  or  when  indeed  he  had  hit  this  mark,  than  how  to 
manage  his  foil  in  fencing  without  a  guiding  influence  from 
the  feelings  of  motion.  Herein,  also,  is  contained  a  wide 
sphere  of  individual  differentiation.  Thus  we  sometimes 
hear  men  arguing  whether  a  certain  argument  is  itself  good, 
with  a  comparative  indifference  as  to  the  truth  of  the  con- 
clusions reached  by  the  argument.  And  one  will  say,  "The 
reasoning  seemed  to  me  excellent,  but  the  conclusion  T  know 
to  be  nonsense ; "  but  another  will  say,  "  To  me,  on  the  con- 
trary, the  conclusions  seemed  true,  but  the  argument  a  weak 
one."  On  examination  it  will  turnout,  probably,  that  in  the 
former  case,  the  flow  of  satisfied  feeling  went  smoothly  on 
until  the  rude  shock  of  the  concluding  judgment  was  felt. 
But  the  other  listener  reached  a  good  piece  of  smooth-feeling 
road  at  the  end  of  a  journey  in  a  cart  without  springs  over  a 
rough  causeway.  Now  both  hearers  feel  bound,  by  the 
sacred  obligation  which  the  consciousness  of  rationality 
imposes  on  every  man,  to  pass  again  in  review  the  experi- 
ences of  their  common  journey.  The  first  will  rest  satisfied 
only  when  he  has  torn  up  again  the  road  he  travelled  so  as 
actually  to  know  where  and  why  he  should  turn  off  by  a  path 
to  escape  the  hateful  termination.  But  the  other  will  strive 
to  build  for  himself  a  better  piece  of  highway  leading  to  the 
same  terminal.  Only  thus  will  both  feel  comfortable  all  the 
way  from  the  point  of  starting  to  their  destination ;  and  this 
is  because  both  are  constantly  being  so  profoundly  influenced 
by  the  regulating  force  of  the  feelings  which  are  the  affective 
functions  of  the  logical  processes. 

There   are   some  forms  of  affective  consciousness  in  all 


KNOWLEDGE  AS  FEELIXG  AND  WILLIXG          187 

knowledge,  however,  which  are  yet  more  mysterious,  and 
which  lie  darker  and  deeper  in  the  depths  of  the  soul.  These 
we  have  called  "  integrating  "  feelings,  because  they  seem  in 
some  sort  constitutive  of  the  very  integrity  of  the  cognitive 
act.  But  so  dark  and  mysterious  are  they  that  it  is  difficult 
to  describe  or  even  to  name  them.  Let  no  one  suppose, 
however,  that,  on  this  account,  they  may  safely  be  overlooked 
or  denied.  For  they  resent  such  treatment  by  rising  to  a 
fine  pitch  of  emotional  excitement.  And  yet  no  other  feel- 
ings are  ordinarily  so  unobtrusive,  but  without  being  any 
the  less  permanent.  Indeed,  these  integrating  feelings  color 
every  act  of  cognition,  and  really  make  it  to  be  cognition  as 
distinguished  from  any  form  of  psychosis  which  is  not 
completely  that. 

Here  consider  for  a  moment  the  emotional  condition  into 
which,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  the  "  plain  man  "  is  thrown  when 
you  bring  before  him  the  sceptical  question  as  to  his  own 
existence,  or  as  to  the  existence  of  the  external  objects  of 
his  cognition,  the  familiar  things  of  his  work-a-day  life.  Let 
one  lay  aside,  as  far  as  possible,  the  psychologist's  fallacies 
and  the  scholastic  philosophical  dogmas.  Let  one  try,  for 
the  time  being,  to  have  the  same  contempt  for  psychology 
and  metaphysics  which  the  plain  man  feels.  But  let  it  be  a 
genuinely  "plain  man"  who  is  questioned,  and  not  a  learned 
ignoramus  who  has  set  up  a  smattering  of  borrowed  and 
misunderstood  psychology  or  a  pretence  of  sceptical  and 
agnostic  philosophy.  How  now  will  such  a  mind  face  the 
questions  :  "  Do  you,  then,  really  exist  ?  "  and,  "  Is  the  stone 
you  are  hammering  with  that  hammer  something  real  ? " 
If  the  attitude  of  the  ordinary  consciousness  be  assumed  and 
held  toward  the  question  (not  toward  the  questioner),  it  will 
by  no  means  be  found  describable  by  affirming  simply :  I 
believe  that  I  am  ;  or  I  imagine  that  I  am ;  or  I  have  an  idea 
that  I  am ;  or  I  think  that  1  am.  One  can  adequately  ex- 
press the  answer  only  by  affirming,  I  know  that  I  am ;  and 


188          KNOWLEDGE  AS  FEELING  AND  WILLING 

by  affirming  it  with  emphasis.  Knowledge,  then,  subjectively 
considered,  is  something  more  than  mere  opinion,  mere  belief, 
mere  idea,  or  mere  thinking.  It  will,  however,  be  allowable 
to  express  the  sum  total  of  this  cognitive  consciousness  by 
saying,  I  feel  that  1  am,  —  if  only  some  qualifying  phrase 
be  added :  I  feel  sure,  very  sure,  that  I  am.  But  this  is  to 
say  that  strong  and  unreasoning  "  conviction  "  characterizes 
the  act  of  self-cognition  in  the  case  of  the  naive  and  unre- 
flecting consciousness. 

It  will  further  be  found  that  the  strength  of  this  conviction 
is  by  no  means  wholly  dependent  upon,  or  chiefly  governed  by, 
the  fulness  of  *clear-thoughted  conception  of  Self  which  the 
subject  of  the  conviction  enjoys.  All  that  self-feeling,  which 
is  wrapped  up,  as  it  were,  in  the  conception  of  Self,  undoubt- 
edly develops  in  some  manner  of  relation  to  those  processes  of 
thinking  which  result  in  forming  the  same  conception.  The 
self-feeling  of  the  child  is,  perhaps,  less  intense  and  compre- 
hensive before  it  has  become  acquainted  with  itself  through 
activities  of  thinking.  But,  however  self-feeling  may  be 
implicated  in  this  element  of  conviction  as  to  the  reality  of 
the  Self,  the  conviction  itself  does  not  result  from  any  argu- 
ment. Its  intensity  can  neither  be  increased  nor  diminished 
by  argument.  In  so-called  "  diseases  of  personality,"  or 
alleged  cases  of  double  or  triple  consciousness,  and  of  strata 
of  selves  lying  one  below  another,  or  of  Egos  bearing  num- 
bers one,  two,  or  more,  that  have  been  "  drawn  off "  and 
consolidated  in  centres  of  selfhood,  it  is  chiefly  disturbances 
of  feeling  which  initiate  the  entire  aberration  of  mind.  So, 
too,  in  the  self-assertion  of  the  normal  mind,  it  is  this  "  feel- 
ing sure,"  this  affective  and  convictive  function,  which 
chiefly  seems  to  authenticate  the  reality  of  the  Self.  We 
have  just  called  it  "  unreasoning."  And  unreasoning  it  cer- 
tainly is,  not  because  it  is  irrational  or  unworthy  of  a  living, 
active  reason,  but  because  it  does  not  seem  to  rely,  for  its 
origin  or  for  its  authentication,  upon  ratiocination.  For  if 


189 

this  "  plain  man  "  be  asked  how  he  knows,  or  why  he  feels  so 
sure  of,  his  own  real  existence,  he  can  only  repeat  that  it  is 
so :  he  knows  —  and  that,  with  him,  is  the  end  of  the  whole 
matter.  His  knowing  is  chiefly  a  feeling-sure. 

Put  as  an  argument  for  the  existence  in  reality  of  the  Self, 
all  this  becomes  reasoning  in  a  circle ;  and  so  short  is  the 
circle  that  we  can  no  sooner  start  out  to  "  round  "  its  circum- 
ference than  we  find  ourselves  back  at  the  point  of  starting. 
For,  in  fact,  it  is  not  a  circulus  in  arguendo  at  all ;  the  case 
is  not  like  the  effort  to  get  around,  behind,  or  beyond  the  act 
of  knowledge  in  order  to  know  what  knowledge  is.  Here  is 
simply  the  solid  matter-of-fact  conviction,  —  a  feeling-sure  of 
my  own  reality  which  admits  of  no  examination,  because  it 
needs  none. 

And  upon  this  level  of  indubitable  conviction  no  one  will 
ever  be  superior  to  the  witness  of  the  "  plain  man's  "  con- 
sciousness. Be  as  subtle  in  analysis,  as  curious  in  psy- 
chological criticism,  as  sceptical  in  inquiry,  as  keen  in 
ratiocinative  powers  as  you  may,  and  you  have  in  no  respect 
here  any  advantage  over  the  man  who  knows  and  heeds 
nothing  of  your  psychology  or  your  metaphysics.  That  same 
intense,  indubitable  conviction  within  you,  too,  bars  the  way 
at  this  point  to  any  further  critical  inquiry.  "  I  know  I  am," 
or  "  I  feel  perfectly  sure  of  my  own  existence,"  as  guaranty 
of  the  here-and-now  being  of  what  I  call  Self,  is  the  last  word 
on  the  matter.  Nothing  profounder  or  more  ultimate  can 
ever  be  discovered  along  this  line  of  investigation.  For  along 
this  line  of  inquiry  we  have  reached,  not  a  "  limiting  concep- 
tion" of  a  negative  character,  but  an  actual  and  ultimate 
feeling-full  positing,  which,  if  we  try  to  dissolve  it  into  its 
elements,  does  not  lessen  its  size  or  soften  its  quality.  And 
in  the  whole  deep  sea  of  human  consciousness  we  shall  never 
find  anything  other  or  more,  of  the  same  kind,  than  this. 
We  may  drag  the  surface  of  that  sea  with  the  fine-meshed 
nets  of  modern  psychology,  and  sink  into  its  bottom  the 


190          KNOWLEDGE  AS  FEELING  AND  WILLING 

anchor  of  religious  faith,  and  send  down  to  its. lowest  depths 
the  skilful  divers  of  metaphysics  and  epistemology ;  but  noth- 
ing like  this,  that  is  not  this  same  thing  in  other  guise,  will 
anywhere  be  found.  But  why  should  one  wish  forever  to 
authenticate  the  surest  of  convictions  with  other  convictions  ? 

Undoubtedly,  the  "  plain  man  "  will  affirm  his  knowledge 
as  a  "  feeling-sure "  with  regard  also  to  the  object  of  his 
cognition  through  the  senses.  Undoubtedly,  too,  the  applica- 
tion of  the  affective  function  of  consciousness  in  all  our  knowl- 
edge of  things  must  be  regarded  as  furnishing  its  own  guar- 
antee. This  is  enough  to  notice  at  the  present  time.  It  does  not 
follow  that  the  embrace  of  the  conviction  of  reality  must  have 
the  same  extent  in  both  of  its  two  main  directions.  That  the 
object-thing  really  is,  and  that  it  is  not  to  be  identified  with 
the  being  which  is  its  cognizing  subject,  are  certainly  held  up 
in  every  mind  as  propositions  supported  by  the  conviction 
that  makes  itself  a  necessary  part  of  every  act  of  knowledge. 
The  fuller  circuits  over  which  reach,  respectively,  the  convic- 
tion of  the  reality  of  Self  and  the  conviction  of  the  reality  of 
Things,  are  to  be  discovered  and  described  only  as  the  result 
of  further  critical  inquiry. 

That  the  Will  is  an  essential  part  of  mental  functioning 
in  every  act  of  knowledge  has  already  been  made  sufficiently 
clear.  Of  feelings  there  are  diverse  kinds,  and  the  ideas  and 
thoughts  of  the  mind  are  not  easily  to  be  numbered.  But 
willing  is  of  essentially  one  kind,  although  reaching  its 
highest  complex  development  in  the  phenomenon  of  moral 
choice.  In  the  previous  chapters  it  has  been  seen  that  the 
thinking  and  judging  which  are  necessary  to  cognition,  and 
therefore  the  act  of  cognition  itself,  are  active  —  that  is,  a 
forthputting  of  the  Self  considered  as  Will.  It  remains  in 
the  present  connection  only  to  note  how,  in  that  melange  of 
experiences  which  comes  through  the  voluntary  handling  of 
the  bodily  organism,  the  knowledge  of  Self  and  of  Things 
gets  progressively  defined. 


KNOWLEDGE  AS  FEELING  AND  WILLING          191 

It  is  not  designed  to  discuss  the  much  debated  question  as 
to  the  origin  and  nature  of  the  feeling  of  effort ;  or  the  other 
even  more  hotly  contested  question,  whether  there  exist  in 
consciousness  any  feelings  of  activity  as  actual  part  of  its 
total  content.1  The  progress  of  physiological  investigation 
seems  rather  to  show  that  the  nervous  currents  going  out 
from  the  motor  elements  of  the  brain  do  modify  consciousness. 
Psychological  analysis  makes  very  clear,  it  seems  to  us,  that 
consciousness  of  activity  is  an  unceasing  element,  or  aspect, 
of  all  consciousness ;  in  other  words,  we  never  cease  to  will 
and  to  know  that  we  are  willing. 

Now,  undoubtedly,  it  is  as  having  muscular  and  tactual 
contact  with  things  —  moving  them  or  trying  with  might  and 
main  to  move  them,  and  being  pushed  about  and  steadily 
resisted  by  them  —  that  the  knowledge  of  things  is  made 
most  vivid  and  most  clear.  If  I  were  not  a  self-conscious 
will,  knowing  myself  as  also  a  Thing  that  acts  and  suffers 
among  other  things,  there  would  be  no  world  of  other  things 
for  me.  I  could  never  know  that  the  world  of  real  things  is, 
and  what  it  is,  by  a  motionless,  inert  life  of  pure  imagination 
and  pure  thought.  The  rather  do  I  enter  into  a  red-blooded 
strife  with  things,  and  by  trying  to  master  them  and  impress 
my  will  upon  them,  learn  to  know  them  as  that-which-will- 
not  always  as  I  will.  It  is  this  relation  of  wills,  with  its  ac- 
companiment of  motor  consciousness  as  an  external  percep- 
tion of  changes  in  place,  and  a  more  internal  sense  of  the 
conditions  and  changes  of  the  motor  apparatus,  which  chiefly 
effects  the  differentiation  of  the  sum  total  of  experience  into 
Knowledge  of  Self  and  Knowledge  of  Things.  Unless  cogni- 
tion were  always  a  matter  of  will,  such  differentiation  could 
not  take  place  at  all.  Unless  changes  of  will  were  accom- 
panied, preceded,  and  followed  by  changes  in  the  sensation- 
content  of  consciousness,  and  also  in  its  affective  character, 

1  On  these  questions,  see  "  Psychology,  Descriptive  and  Explanatory,"  chap- 
ters xi.,  xxii.,  xxvi. ;  and  "  Philosophy  of  Mind,"  chapters  iii.,  iv.,  vii.,  viii. 


192          KNOWLEDGE   AS  FEELING  AND  WILLING 

cognition  could  not  accomplish  this  differentiation  in  the 
manner  in  which  it  actually  does  bring  it  about.  Thus  the 
extension  of  the  doctrine  of  the  nature  of  knowledge,  as  thus 
far  set  forth,  leads  to  the  further  study  of  the  division  of  all 
the  objects  of  knowledge,  into  Things  and  Self. 


CHAPTER  VII 

KNOWLEDGE  OF  THINGS  AND  KNOWLEDGE  OF  SELF* 

AMONG  the  various  distinctions  which  it  seems  necessary 
to  recognize  in  order  to  describe  and  understand  the 
mental  phenomenon  called  cognition,  the  most  important  and 
fundamental  is  that  between  subject  and  object.  Indeed, 
this  distinction  seems  in  some  sort  to  be  involved  in  the 
very  act  of  cognition.  To  know,* one  must  distinguish  and 
make  his  own  some  object ;  for  the  "  I  know "  which  de- 
scribes the  act  of  cognition  is  actually  a  knowledge  of  some- 
thing or  other,  —  an  activity  determined  with  reference  to 
somewhat  that  is  known.  Yet  this  act  is  also  necessarily 
regarded  as  some  one's  act,  or,  at  least,  as  some  one's  ex- 
perience by  way  of  knowledge,  so  to  speak ;  since  the  word 
"  I,"  which  stands  as  the  subject  of  the  sentence  declarative 
of  the  experience,  is  as  essential  to  the  full  meaning  of  the 
sentence  as  is  the  additional  phrase  defining  the  terminal 
upon  which  the  act  alights  in  the  form  of  a  judgment. 

Another  distinction  which  is  popularly  made  to  apply  to 
different  cognitive  acts,  so  as  to  sort  them  into  two  distinct 
kinds,  is  connected  with  the  distinction  of  subject  and  object. 
This  other  distinction  is  thought  of  as  applying  to  the  objects 
of  knowledge  themselves ;  it  divides  them  into  classes  which 
must  by  no  means  be  confused  with  one  another,  if  the  sub- 
ject would  make  good  in  reality  its  claim  to  have  a  genuine 
cognition.  On  the  basis  of  this  latter  distinction,  then,  epis- 

1  For  a  treatment  of  the  same  topic  from  the  point  of  view  of  descriptive 
psychology,  see  chapter  xxii.  by  the  same  title,  in  the  author's  "  Psychology,"  etc. 

13 


194  KNOWLEDGE   OF  THINGS  AND  OF   SELF 

temology  has  to  consider  the  nature,  grounds,  certitude,  and 
more  ultimate  meaning  of  the  Knowledge  of  Things  and  the 
Knowledge  of  Self.  It  would  appear  that  account  must  be 
taken  of  the  distinction  between  subject  and  object,  if  any 
theory  of  knowledge  is  to  Jbe  established.  But  it  would  also 
appear  that  account  must  be  taken  of  that  distinction  between 
objects  upon  the  basis  of  which  a  division  of  cognitive  pro- 
cesses into  kinds  is  frequently  set  up.  Indeed  the  critical 
examination  which  all  epistemological  theory  presupposes  will 
show  that  the  former  distinction  is  essential  to  knowledge 
as  such  ;  but  the  latter  distinction  is  the  basis  of  that  system 
of  cognitions  which  not  only  sets  the  Self  into  relations  with 
a  known  world  of  things,  but  also  sets  these  things  into 
known  relations  with  each  other  so  as  to  form  a  "  world " 
out  of  them  all.  The  more  ultimate  bearings  of  both  these 
distinctions  it  belongs  to  metaphysics  rather  than  to  epis- 
temology  to  subject  to  critical  treatment. 

Grammar,  arid  for  the  most  part  also  logic,  discusses  the 
distinction  of  subject  and  object  as  a  purely  formal  affair. 
According  to  the  rules  with  which  the  grammarian  is  busied, 
any  perception  or  conception  can  be  substituted  for  the  S 
which  indicates  the  subject,  and  as  well  for  the  P  which 
stands  in  the  place  of  the  predicate  and  thus  objectively  deter- 
mines the  subject  by  virtue  of  some  connection  of  a  copula,  — 
if  only  the  rules  of  correct  form  be  observed.  For  grammar 
looks  only  after  violations  of  the  rules  for  gender,  number, 
and  case,  or  for  the  positions  in  which  the  words  of  the 
sentence  are  arranged  according  to  good  usage  in  the  par- 
ticular language  employed,  etc.  As  it  becomes  more  thor- 
oughly psychological,  grammar  abstracts  from  considerations 
peculiar  to  particular  languages,  and  considers  the  laws  of 
the  expression  of  human  thinking,  feeling,  willing,  in  any 
form  of  articulate  speech.  But  as  to  the  origin,  nature,  and 
validity  of  the  distinction  affirmed  between  S  and  P,  as  rep- 
resentative of  an  implied  differentiation  and  unification  in 


KNOWLEDGE  OF  THINGS  AND  OF  SELF  195 

reality,  it  is  not  interested  to  inquire.  Nor  is  the  distinction 
which  it  authorizes  between  the  subject  and  the  predicate  the 
exact  equivalent  of  that  distinction  between  subject  and  object 
which  all  acts  of  cognition  imply.  For  let  the  sentence  under 
examination  be  made  an  affirmation  of  some  act  of  cognition, 
and  the  grammatical  theory  of  the  sentence  is  not  changed. 
"  I  know  assuredly  that  the  snow  is  white  "  is  not  essentially 
different,  for  grammatical  structure,  from  "  I  imagine  that, 
in  Utopia,  the  snow  is  a  delicate  grass-green ; "  or  "  I  re- 
member to  have  heard  with  incredulity  that  red  snow  has 
sometimes  fallen."  Here,  says  the  grammarian,  are  three 
words,  —  "  know,"  "  imagine,"  and  "  remember,"  —  all  having 
the  same  subject  "  I,"  all  in  the  present  indicative,  and  all 
having  for  the  object  of  their  active  mood  a  dependent  sen- 
tence or  clause.  For  the  theory  of  knowledge,  however,  as 
concerned  with  the  nature  and  validity  of  the  relations  ex- 
pressed by  these  different  words  between  the  subject  and  the 
object,  and  more  especially  with  the  reality  of  both  subject 
and  object  as  existent  in  these  relations,  the  difference  be- 
tween such  grammatically  similar  sentences  is  quite  unique. 

Nor  does  so-called  formal  logic  take  to  heart  the  distinc- 
tion between  subject  and  object  as  it  becomes  the  searcher 
after  a  true  theory  of  knowledge  to  do.  This  science  of 
logic,  indeed,  will  tell  you  something  more  important  and 
more  nearly  fundamental,  from  the  epistemological  points 
of  view,  than  is  attempted  by  the  grammarian.  Hence, 
while  the  grammarian  only  occasionally  makes  an  appeal  to 
psychology  or  philosophy  to  discover  or  to  justify  his  opinions, 
the  logician  almost  constantly  and  quite  inevitably  moves 
along  the  border-lines  between  his  special  inquiry  and  that 
of  epistemology.  Indeed,  logical  praxis  tells  us  how  to  make 
such  combinations  of  S  and  P  as  shall  lead  to  expansion  of 
our  knowledge  of  S  and  P,  and  to  the  development  of  truth 
regarding  them.  Yet  here,  even,  —  somewhat  curiously,  as 
it  seems  to  us,  —  the  expansion  of  knowledge,  the  develop- 


196  KNOWLEDGE  OF  THINGS  AND  OF  SELF 

ment  of  truth,  secured  and  guaranteed  by  conformity  to  the 
laws  of  logic,  all  depends  upon  the  belief  that  the  original 
distinction,  by  way  of  differentiation,  relation,  and  unification, 
of  S  and  P  has  been  somehow,  otherwise  than  by  logic,  se- 
cured and  guaranteed. 

When,  however,  this  distinction  of  subject  and  object  is 
taken  to  psychology,  as  a  purely  descriptive  and  explanatory 
science,  it  receives  a  yet  more  unsatisfactory  and  tantalizing 
treatment.  For,  first  of  all,  in  explanation  of  the  distinction 
itself,  as  the  fact  of  it  appears  to  be  most  plainly  set  into 
reality  by  every  act  of  cognition,  we  are  introduced  to  a  series 
of  shallow  sophisms  and  abstractions  which  end  by  doing 
away  with  the  reality  of  this  distinction.  It  is  pointed  out 
that,  of  course,  the  only  way  in  which  the  subject  could  ever 
know  itself,  is  to  make  itself  its  own  object.  But  in  doing  this 
it  parts  with  the  privilege  of  knowing  itself  as  subject ;  for 
the  self  which  is  known  is,  by  virtue  of  its  being  known,  an 
object  of  its  own  knowledge.  How  now  shall  one  find  one's 
self  so  as  to  know  that  one  is,  and  how  one  is,  since  in  the 
very  process  of  cognition,  attention  must  be  centrifugally 
directed,  as  it  were  ?  Yet  again,  what  is  the  nature  of  this 
object-self  ?  When  truly  answered,  the  question  leads  us,  we 
are  told,  to  recognize  the  fact  that  somehow  a  special  aggre- 
gate of  sensations,  with  a  peculiarly  vivid  and  warm  color- 
tone  of  feeling,  which  may  be  localized  in  the  throat  or 
elsewhere,  gets  to  be  dominant  in  the  field  of  consciousness. 
Thus  the  conclusion  of  scientific  psychology,  without  pre- 
judice from  epistemology  or  the  metaphysical  doctrine  of  a 
soul,  resolves  the  distinction  between  subject  and  object  into 
a  distinction  between  differently  colored  and  aggregated  sen- 
sation-contents of  consciousness,  —  objectively  determined,  it 
might  as  well  at  once  be  added,  by  influences  over  which  the 
subject  has  no  control. 

But  if  the  subject  has  disappeared  from  the  actuality  of 
this  transaction  called  knowledge,  in  which  the  distinction 


KNOWLEDGE  OF  THINGS  AND  OF  SELF  197 

of  subject  and  object  is  popularly  supposed  somehow  to  be 
involved,  what  becomes  of  the  distinction  itself  ?  It  is,  of 
course,  resolved  into  a  mere  distinction,  content-wise  (and, 
perhaps,  merely  in  the  matter  of  sensation-contents)  between 
different  kinds  of  conscious  states, —  objectively  determined. 
Such  psychological  analysis  no  more  finds  a  real  soul,  an 
actually  existent  subject  of  states  standing  in  relation  of 
cognition  to  trans-subjectively  existent  object-things,  than 
the  dissection  of  the  anatomist  finds  such  a  soul  on  break- 
ing apart,  post-mortem,  the  elements  of  the  brain.  Let  it 
not  be  forgotten,  however,  that  in  consistency  the  same 
psychological  procedure  must  be  applied  to  the  object  of 
knowledge  when  that  object  happens  to  be  some  Thing,  in- 
stead of  appearing  as  my  Self.  And  when  this  has  been  done, 
when  our  psychology  has  been  beautifully  and  thoroughly 
consistent  with  its  analysis  of  psychoses  after  the  approved 
modern  pattern,  then  there  is  left  neither  party  to  the  now 
obsolete  distinction.  Subject  is  resolved  into  a  passing  phase 
of  object,  and  object,  even  when  object-thing,  is  a  passing 
phase  of  subject ;  the  distinction  has  lost  its  validity  for 
reality ;  the  act  of  knowledge  is  accounted  for  by  denying 
that  it  actually  is  what  all  men,  outside  of  the  ranks  of  a 
certain  school  of  psychologists,  understand  an  act  of  knowl- 
edge to  be. 

It  appears,  then,  that  the  philosophical  doctrine  of  knowl- 
edge requires  something  more  than  either  the  grammatical, 
or  the  logical,  or  the  pseudo-psychological  account  of  these 
distinctions,  if  it  would  save  itself  from  the  gulf  of  complete 
agnosticism.  This  need  begins  to  be  satisfied  when  we  recog- 
nize the  unsatisfactory  character  of  every  psychological  ac- 
count of  knowledge  which  gives  us  no  other  and  deeper  view 
of  self-consciousness  and  of  sense-perception  than  that  which 
has  just  been  arraigned. 

We  are  told  on  the  authority  of  Herbart  and  others  that 
self-consciousness  as  self-cognition  cannot  be  admitted  in 


198  KNOWLEDGE  OF   THINGS  AND  OF   SELF 

fact,  because  the  very  conception  of  it  involves  an  attempt 
at  movement  in  a  perpetual  circle.  It  must  be  admitted 
that  since  we  are  not  all  at  once  self-conscious,  whether 
consideration  be  had  of  the  acquirement  of  the  so-called 
faculty  in  the  development  of  the  mind  or  of  the  individual 
act  of  "  coming-to "  self-consciousness,  the  origins  of  this 
form  of  cognition  are  obscure.  This  is  true  of  origins  of  all 
sorts,  and  generally.  Whatever  may  be  allowed  for  some  faint 
trace  of  self -feel  ing,  as  inhering  in  every  act  or  state  of  con- 
sciousness, our  explanation  of  self-consciousness  can  only  be 
analytical  and  developmental,  as  it  were.  The  most  funda- 
mental factors  appear  above  the  threshold  of  consciousness 
as  arising  out  of  the  obscure,  the  totally  dark  background  of 
the  nature  of  the  Self.  No  effort  of  memory  or  of  imagina- 
tion can  recall  or  represent  them  as  they  originally  were. 
A  complete  descriptive  science  of  the  origins  and  grounds  of 
self-consciousness  is  therefore  forever  hidden  from  our  ken. 
On  this  account,  however,  we  must  not  fall  into  the  psycho- 
logical fallacy  of  substituting  abstractions  for  real  and  living 
experiences,  and  then  so  manipulating  these  abstractions, 
and  setting  them  into  antinomic  and  irreconcilably  contra- 
dictory relations  with  each  other,  as  to  deny  the  plain  mean- 
ing of  the  experiences  themselves.  Self-consciousness  is  not 
an  abstraction.  The  description  of  it  may  be,  and  often  is, 
a  mere  abstract  relating  of  abstractions.  But,  in  actuality, 
self-consciousness  is  the  experience  of  a  being  with  itself.  This 
experience  is  at  times  so  rich  and  content-full,  that  when  fully 
apprehended  and  faithfully  described,  it  is  seen  to  involve  at- 
tending to  and  thinking  about  the  self,  feeling  of  self,  — 
the  affection  of  being  alive  as  both  suffering  and  doing,  — 
and  activity  that  is  self-directing  as  well  as  self-cognizing.1 

1  Compare  the  rather  stilted  but  forceful  language  of  Klein,  Die  Genesis 
der  Kategorien,  pp.  17  f. :  "  Sein  Sichfinden  und  Sichdenken  ist  ein  Sichwissen, 
sowohl  als  Realeinheit  (Substanz),  wie  als  Ursache,  we'd  ursachende  Sache  zugleich 
( Causalitat,  causales  Princip) ;  mithin  ein  Sichfinden  nicht  bloss  als  Trager  des 
Scheins,  sondern  als  mitwiirker,  und  deshalbs  als  Trager  des  Erscheinens." 


KNOWLEDGE  OF  THINGS  AND  OF   SELF  199 

Whatever  may  be  thought  as  to  the  chronological  or  psy- 
chological priority  of  the  different  acts  and  kinds  of  knowl- 
edge, there  can  be  no  doubt  that  self-consciousness  is  entitled 
to  priority  when  viewed  from  the  epistemological  points  of 
view.  If  any  form  of  cognition  is  destined  to  be  regarded  as 
an  envisagement  of  reality,  and  to  claim  the  deepest  and 
intensest  manifestation  of  that  conviction  which  we  have 
seen  to  constitute  an  integrating  factor  of  all  cognitive  acts, 
such  form  of  cognition  comes  through  self-consciousness. 
An  immediateness  of  knowledge  which  surpasses  that  with 
which  I  know  myself  as  here  and  now  existent,  cannot  be 
gained  by  any  sharpening  or  spurring  of  the  mental  faculties. 
Nor  can  any  truer  and  surer  envisagement  of  reality  be  made 
even  an  object  of  imagination.  Indeed,  all  that  I  conceive 
of  as  "  intuitive,"  as  doing  away  with  all  barriers  between 
knowing  subject  and  reality  known,  is  conceived  of  after  the 
type  of  my  experience  with  myself.  How  can  angels,  or  even 
God,  know  anything  more  indubitably  and  transparently  given, 
object  to  subject,  in  the  unity  of  the  embrace  of  cognition, 
than  is  my  here-and-now  existence  to  my  here-and-now  ex- 
istent-Self ?  If  there  be  a  more  immediate  and  indubitable 
form  of  envisagement  possible,  no  human  being  can  even  get 
standing  for  a  flight  of  imagination  which  shall  discern  that 
form.  Let  not  epistemology  continue  to  repeat  the  mistake 
of  Kant  in  neglecting  this  truth. 

Introspection  and  observation  of  the  actual  course  in  de- 
velopment of  mental  life,  helped  out  by  sound  reflective 
thinking,  leads  to  a  negative  conclusion  regarding  the  dis- 
tinction of  subject  and  object  in  the  earliest  psychic  processes. 
Active  imaging  and  discriminating  considered  as  function, 
on  the  one  hand,  and  object  considered  as  point  of  regard 
and  as  content  discriminated,  on  the  other  hand  (Vorstellen 
and  Object),  were  not  originally  separate  as  facts  in  the 
one  experience  of  the  inchoate  mental  life.  Much  less 
were  they  extant  as  separate  entities  envisaged  in  the  one 


200  KNOWLEDGE  OF  THINGS  AND  OF  SELF 

stream  of  consciousness.  To  imagine  them  as,  not  merely 
separable,  but  also  as  actually  separated  "  moments "  or 
factors  in  the  psychic  flow,  is  to  transpose  conceptions  re- 
sulting from  our  experience  with  our  own  growth  of  knowl- 
edge, back  into  those  conditions  when  as  yet  knowledge  was 
not  begun.  To  imagine  subject  and  object  pre-existent  as 
entities  is  to  introduce,  in  another  way,  the  conflict  of 
abstractions,  —  the  abstract  antinomies  which  result  in  de- 
stroying the  very  being  of  cognition. 

How  now  did  that  distinction  into  subject  and  object  arise, 
which  in  its  most  immediate  and  supreme  form  of  application 
belongs  to  all  the  knowledge  of  self-consciousness  ?  This 
question  can  be  partially  answered  only  by  a  careful  atten- 
tion to  the  two  main  aspects  of  all  conscious  states.  Every 
state  of  consciousness  may  —  indeed,  must  be  regarded  as  both 
passive  and  active.  As  a  state,  it  is  determined  by  being 
subjected  to  influences  passively  received ;  but  it  is  also  self- 
determining  by  virtue  of  the  fact  that  it,  as  a  conscious  ener- 
gizing, takes  part  in  shaping  these  same  influences.  It  is  on 
the  basis  of  this  double  nature,  which  belongs  to  all  our 
psychic  life  and  which  presents  every  portion  of  that  life  as, 
of  necessity,  both  passive  and  active,  that  the  distinction  of 
subject  and  object  as  applied  to  the  Self  reposes.  But  the 
realization  of  this  very  distinction  demands  an  activity  of  the 
mind  itself.  We  do  not  account  for  what  actually  takes  place 
by  speaking  as  though  subject  and  object  distinguished  them- 
selves, after  the  fashion  of  atoms  of  oxygen  and  atoms  of 
hydrogen  when  a  compound  of  the  two  is  broken  up.  Each 
kind  of  atom  then  goes  to  its  own  place ;  each  aggregates 
itself,  by  favor  of  what  we  call  its  "  affinity,"  to  the  group  to 
which  it  belongs.  But  passive  atoms  of  the  stream  of  con- 
sciousness do  not,  of  themselves,  flow  together  into  an  object- 
self,  and  active  atoms  into  a  subject-self,  according  to  laws  of 
psychic  affinity.  The  rather  is  it  the  work  of  the  consciously 
active  mind,  by  a  progressive  mastery  of  its  own  being,  to  dis- 


KNOWLEDGE  OF  THINGS  AND  OF  SELF  201 

criminate,  to  assimilate,  and  to  generalize  the  factors,  both 
active  and  passive,  of  its  one  psychic  life.  At  whatever  for- 
gotten and  to  imagination  irrecoverable  time,  the  work  of 
discriminating  consciousness  became  complete  enough  to  in- 
troduce this  distinction  for  the  momentary  diremption  of  the 
stream  of  consciousness,  then  an  act  of  self-consciousness  took 
place.  Then  I  became  aware  of  myself  as  doing  or  suffering 
in  some  definitively  segregated  state.  The  doing,  regarded  as 
conscious  discriminating,  as  thinking  activity,  as  the  becom- 
ing aware  =  I  myself  as  knowing.  The  doing,  or  suffer- 
ing, regarded  as  that  of  which  I  become  aware  =  the  Self, 
known.1 

The  foregoing  description  of  an  act  of  self-consciousness 
is  also,  in  all  important  features,  a  description  of  an  act  of 
cognition.  It  may  be  more  or  less  of  the  so-called  immedi- 
ate order,  and  so  comparable  to  perception  of  things  by  the 
senses,  or  it  may  be  framed  so  as  to  make  conceptual  and 
thinking  processes  more  prominent ;  but  in  either  event  it  is 
an  act  of  cognition.  We  should  expect,  then,  to  find  that  it 
is  pervaded  with  feeling  of  a  peculiar  and  appropriate  kind  ; 
and  that  it  is  supported  by  that  conviction  as  to  the  reality  of 
its  object,  and  that  grasp  of  will  upon  reality,  which  have  been 
seen  to  characterize  all  the  cognitive  processes.  What  we  are 
entitled  to  expect,  that  we  actually  find.  Indeed,  this  cog- 
nition of  the  reality  of  Self,  as  given  in  self-consciousness, 
has  already  (see  pp.  170  f.),  on  account  of  its  feeling-full  and 
firm  grasp,  been  made  the  typical  example  of  all  cognition. 

From  the  epistemological  point  of  view,  then,  the  distinc- 
tion of  subject  and  object,  not  as  merely  formal  or  phenome- 
nal, but,  on  the  one  hand,  as  entering  into  the  essential 
nature  of  knowledge  as  a  subjective  process,  and  on  the  other 


1  The  stages  in  the  development  of  self-knowledge,  as  determined  by  the  nnm- 
ber  and  character  of  the  bodily  or  other  elements  entering  into  the  object-self,  or 
otherwise  determined  do  not  concern  us  here.  But  see  "  Psychology,  Descriptive 
and  Explanatory,"  pp.  519  f.,  and  "  Philosophy  of  Mind,"  pp.  81  f.,  245  f. 


202  KNOWLEDGE   OF  THINGS  AND  OF   SELF 

hand,  as  teaching  the  very  nature  of  the  reality  of  the  object 
of  knowledge,  is  most  fundamental  in  character.  Its  "  intui- 
tion "  is  of  the  most  immediate  and  supremely  self-confident 
order;  it  is  most  unmistakable  and  inextinguishable.  Self- 
consciousness  is  a  pre-eminently  "  intuitive  "  act  of  knowledge. 
But  self-consciousness  is  the  experience  of  a  being  actively 
cognizing  its  own  doings  and  sufferings  as  they  actually  are,  — 
as  they,  to  speak  figuratively,  occur  under  its  own  eye.  The 
relation  of  subject  and  object,  as  this  relation  is  involved  in 
all  cognition,  cannot,  then,  be  regarded  as  a  limitation,  or  a 
bordering  concept  that  merely  marks  the  immense  horizon  of 
the  unknown.  This  very  relation,  in  which  the  real  subject 
stands  to  the  real  object,  is  an  actual,  concrete,  and  indubi- 
table experience  :  it  is  not  ignorance ;  it  is  rather  that 
commerce  of  being  with  itself  in  which  the  essence  of  all 
knowledge  exists.  In  this  typical  case  of  self-consciousness, 
surely,  experience  is  its  own  guarantee  of  reality.  The  real- 
ization of  this  relation,  which  separates  what  is  really  one, 
in  order  consciously  to  judge  it  to  be  one,  capable  of  acting 
and  reacting  in  a  living  unity  of  related  existence,  is  not  to 
be  spoken  of  as  an  impotent  deed,  a  mark  of  hopeless  limita- 
tions, a  never  ceasing  and  inescapable  temptation  to  scepti- 
cism and  to  agnosticism.  The  rather  is  it  the  method  of 
mind  in  knowledge,  following  the  transactions  that  go  on  in 
reality.  We  have  no  higher  type  of  the  divine  and  absolute 
cognitive  activity  than  the  realization  by  the  conscious  human 
spirit  of  the  actuality  of  its  own  inter-related  self-activities. 

At  all  events,  the  maintaining  of  the  validity  of  the  distinc- 
tion of  subject  and  object,  as  actualized  in  every  cognitive 
act,  is  the  sole  and  sufficient  security  for  all  human  claims 
to  knowledge  of  every  kind.  Once  let  this  distinction  go, 
with  all  that  is  implicated  in  the  distinction  as  to  the  being 
and  nature  of  the  really  existent,  and  everything  slips  from 
our  grasp.  For  this  dual  nature  of  the  Real,  as  actualized  in 
the  concrete  experience  of  the  Self  with  itself,  is  the  last  for- 


KNOWLEDGE  OF  THINGS  AND  OF  SELF  203 

tress,  impregnable  and  centrally  situated  in  the  domain  of 
knowledge.  If  it  be  taken,  nothing  remains  to  mark  the 
difference  between  knowledge  and  not-knowledge.  This 
light,  thrown  from  the  experience  of  subject  and  object, 
as  necessarily  distinguished  in  the  very  relation  which  unites 
them,  comes  from  the  sun  in  the  solar  system  of  the  mind. 
With  the  obscuration  or  setting  of  this  sun,  no  celestial  light, 
otherwise  derived,  can  ever  break  over  the  scene.  Starlight 
and  moonlight  are  not  in  these  heavens.  Landscape  and 
observer  are  no  longer  distinguishable ;  landscape  and  ob- 
server no  longer  exist.  It  is  not  simply  as  though  a  more 
than  midnight  darkness  had  temporarily  fallen  over  the 
whole  earth.  It  is  rather  that  both  the  earth  and  the  lights 
set  in  the  heavens  to  rule  over  it  by  day  and  by  night,  have 
forever  vanished  in  the  limitless  void.  Nothing  is ;  for  the 
principle  of  creation  and  the  product  of  creation  are  alike 
gone. 

It  will  be  well  for  the  successful  termination  of  our  further 
quest  after  the  foundations  and  limitations  of  human  cogni- 
tion, and  also  for  our  peace  of  mind  in  viewing  the  practical 
bearings  of  the  theoretical  conclusions,  not  to  forget  what  has 
just  been  brought  to  mind.  We  repeat,  then,  —  regardless  of 
the  risk  of  being  accused  of  needless  prolixity.  Whatever 
may  be  the  true  descriptive  history  which  psychology  feels 
obliged  to  give  of  the  normal  development  and  of  the  occa- 
sional aberrations  of  self-consciousness,  the  import  of  our 
analysis  is  unmistakable  and  undeniable.  The  reality  of  the 
subject  and  the  reality  of  the  object,  and  the  actuality  of  that 
relation  between  subject  and  object  which  is  essential  to  cognition, 
are  an  indubitable  experience  in  every  act  of  self-consciousness. 
The  existence  of  the  subject  and  the  existence  of  the  object,  as 
herein  given,  is  not  a  matter  of  mere  thinking,  or  of  mere  be- 
lieving, or  of  mere  mental  representation.  The  relation  is  not 
an  abstraction  or  an  image  of  that  which  may,  or  may  not,  be 
true  in  reality.  In  this  supreme  and  most  complete  act  of 


204  KNOWLEDGE  OF  THINGS    AND  OF  SELF 

knowledge  —  the  knowledge  which  I  have  of  the  here-and-now 
being  of  myself  as  objectively  determined,  thus  rather  than 
in  some  other  way  —  the  nature  of  knowledge,  with  its  guar- 
anteed envisagement  of  reality,  most  completely  and  su- 
premely reveals  itself.  No  merely  grammatical,  or  merely 
logical,  or  merely  psychological  (if  by  this  latter  term  we 
understand  the  superficial  description  of  the  content  of  con- 
sciousness, as  a  "  bundle  "  or  "  aggregate  "  of  sensations  and 
feelings)  account  of  self-consciousness  suffices  to  satisfy 
the  facts.  For  in  the  experience  of  self-consciousness,  we 
have  given  the  reality  of  the  subject  as  an  active  knower, 
the  reality  of  the  object  as  a  being  known,  and  the  actuality 
of  a  relation  which  distinguishes  subject  and  object  and  yet 
binds  them  in  a  living  unity  of  cognition.  Thus  much  is 
given,  —  just  as  truly  for  the  insane  man  as  for  the  sane, 
or  for  the  victim  of  so-called  "  double  consciousness,"  as 
for  the  proudest  possessor  of  a  single  self-conscious  peerless 
Self.1 

1  As  to  the  speculative  outcome  of  this  fact,  when  critically  and  systematically 
expounded,  see  the  author's  "  Philosophy  of  Mind,"  passim,  and  especially  chap- 
ters iv.,  v.,  vi.  Various  writers  emphasize  particular  aspects  of  this  fundamental 
truth  in  more  or  less  forceful  and  interesting  ways,  for  example,  Caspari, 
Grundprobleme  der  Erkenntnissthatigkeit,  p.  100,  says :  "  Hebt  man  zu  Gunsten 
von  S  (Subject)  0  (Object)  auf  (Fickle)  oder  umgekehrt  zu  Gunsten  von  0  das  S 
auf  (die  Sensualisten),  oder  lassen  wir  gar  0  und  S  coincidiren,  und  zu  einem  hS- 
herem,  beide  gemeinschqftlich  umfassenden  Y  zusammenfliessen,  so  heben  wir  jedes- 
mal  die  wahre  Natur  des  Intellects  selbst  auf." 

In  remarking  upon  Laas'  question  (Einige  Bemerkungen  zur  Transcendental- 
philosophie,  in  the  Strassburger  Ahhandlungen  zur  Philosophic,  Freiburg, 
1883) .  "  What  guarantees  the  identity  and  uniformity  of  this  Self  of  mine  more 
than  the  identity  and  uniformity  of  Space  and  of  Nature  ?  "  lliehl  affirms  (Der 
Philosophische  Kriticismus,  II.,  ii.,  p.  78) :  "  It  is  obvious  that  experience  is  possible 
only  so  long  and  so  far  as  constancy  and  uniformity  actually  exist,  and  are 
thought  of  as  existing,  as  well  on  the  side  of  the  object  as  on  that  of  the  subject. 
Experience  would  be  destroyed,  not  merely  if  we  think  of  the  persistence  and 
uniformity  of  objects  as  annihilated,  but  also  if  the  subject  ceased  to  be  conscious 
of  its  own  Self  in  the  mental  representation  of  the  objects.  But  it  must  be  con- 
fessed that  the  objective  constancy  and  uniformity  is  to  be  recognized  only 
through  the  identity  of  the  subject  whose  correlate  it  pictures." 

See  also  Werner  (Grundlinien  der  Philosophic,  p.  6,  Regensburg,  1885): 
"  Das  Uebersinnliche  erscheint  im  selbstbewusstem  Denkleben  des  menschliclten 


KNOWLEDGE  OF  THINGS  AND  OF  SELF  205 

It  has  been  customary  to  say  (chiefly  by  the  old-fashioned 
dogmatists)  that,  in  the  case  of  the  knowledge  which  comes 
through  self-consciousness,  the  being  of  the  subject  and  the 
being  of  the  object  is  known  as  "  identical"  "  I  know  my- 
self," is  its  formula.  For  is  it  not  I  that  know,  and  /  that 
am  known;  and  are  not  the  cognizing  Self  and  the  cog- 
nized Self,  of  course,  one  and  the  same  reality  ?  How  much 
of  truth  there  certainly  is  in  all  such  doctrine,  as  well  as 
how  much  of  error  there  may  be  in  some  of  its  applications, 
the  critical  examination  of  the  concepts  of  identity  and  of 
reality  is  needed  to  determine.  Strictly  speaking,  I  cannot 
affirm  either  identity  or  reality  of  myself  —  not  even  as 
known  in  Self-consciousness  —  without  going  through  a  pro- 
cess of  cognition.  And  it  will  be  a  necessary  characteristic 
of  this,  as  of  every  process  of  cognition,  that  the  distinction 
of  subject  and  object,  as  valid  in  reality,  should  be  actualized 
in  a  concrete  experience.  So  that,  in  some  sort,  I  as  subject 
am  not  identical  with  me  as  object.  "  I  know  myself  to  be 
thus  and  no  otherwise  objectively  determined ; "  this  implies 
that  the  distinction  of  subject  and  object  as  truly  as  the 
identification  of  the  two,  should  be  realized  in  the  act  of 
cognition,  if  the  particular  cognitive  act  is  to  be  an  act  of 
self-knowledge.  But  about  all  this  our  perplexity  and  dis- 
tress pass  away  when  it  is  understood  that  the  conception  of 
identity  which  is  customarily  introduced  at  this  point  is  itself 
a  most  misleading  and  indeed  impossible  conception.  For 
an  identity  that  admits  of  no  form  of  differentiation,  is  an 
identity  which  on  account  of  the  very  nature  of  all  cognitive 
processes,  can  never  be  known.  It  is  also  a  form  of  identity 
which  can  never  be  realized  ;  for  to  be  identical  in  this  way 
would  amount  to  not  really  being  at  all.  To  be  dead  and 

Geistfs  gleichsam  als  ideeles  Spiegelbild,  dessen  Reflex  sick  erhellend  iiber  die  er- 
fahrungmdssig  gegebene  WirkUchkeit  des  irdischen  Daseins  verbreltet.  Das  geis- 
tige  Denkleben  in  welchem  diese  Reflexion  des  Uebersinnlichen  vermittelt  lasst  sich 
sehr  wohl  einem  Spiegel  vergleichen,  und  seine  Thdtigkeit  in  Wahrheit  eine  Speku- 
lation  nennen." 


206  KNOWLEDGE  OF  THINGS  AND  OF  SELF 

worse  than  dead,  to  be  nothing,  the  mere  negation  of  all 
being,  would  be  the  only  actual  (sic)  equivalent  for  such  a 
conception  of  identity.  Especially,  however,  would  it  be  un- 
true to  affirm  self-identity  of  any  being  which  lives  and  grows, 
in  a  way  to  contradict  the  validity  of  the  distinction  of  subject 
and  object  as  this  distinction  is  actualized  in  self-conscious- 
ness ;  supremely  absurd,  too,  when  it  is  considered  that  it  is 
self-cognition  which  touches  the  heights  of  rational  life  and 
rational  development,  by  actualizing  that  which  is  the  only 
source  and  guarantee  of  the  concepts  both  of  identity  and 
also  of  reality. 

In  the  act  of  self-cognition,  a  certain  unlikeness,  an  obvious 
and  indisputable  distinction  of  subject  and  object  is  implicated. 
But  their  complete  incomparability  is  denied;  and  their  act- 
ual unification  in  some  form  is  affirmed.  The  cognitive  act 
itself  is  an  actual  unification  of  the  two.  For  the  synthesis  of 
knowledge  must  be  so  conceived  of  as  not  to  annul  the  actu- 
ality of  this  distinction.  The  type  of  the  relation  is  not  iden- 
tity,—  if  by  this  we  mean  a  complete  and  indistinguishable 
sameness  of  characteristics,  such  as  would  be  equivalent  to 
a  denial  of  all  process,  change,  difference  in  aspects,  or  for- 
ward movement  of  life.  The  type  of  the  relation  is  rather 
that  of  a  commerce,  or  intercourse,  in  which  both  of  the 
"  momenta  "  or  factors  retain  their  reality,  but  are  unified  by 
taking  part,  as  it  were,  in  a  common  cause.  Really,  I  am 
not,  as  subject  of  my  activity  in  self-consciousness,  the  same 
as  the  me  which  I  both  make  and  find  to  be  the  object  of  this 
activity.  I  am  partially,  but  not  wholly  self-determined  by 
the  character  of  the  activity.  In  comprehending  the  signifi- 
cance of  this  statement  T  gain  insight  into  the  nature  of 
knowledge  and  into  the  nature  of  reality  as  well.  For  it  is 
in  this  experience  that  the  foundations  both  of  epistemology 
and  of  ontology  are  laid. 

The  study  of  intellectual  development  assures  us,  however, 
that  the  knowledge  of  the  individual  man  and  of  the  race 


KNOWLEDGE  OF  THINGS  AND  OF  SELF  207 

recognizes  another  scarcely  less  fundamental  and  important 
distinction.  This  is  the  distinction  already  referred  to  as 
that  made  among  the  objects  of  cognition.  These  objects 
divide  themselves  into  things  and  minds;  and  since  all 
knowledge  of  other  minds  comes  only  through  one's  growth 
of  skill  in  interpreting  the  changes  in  things  as  signs  of 
changes  in  other  streams  of  consciousness  than  one's  own, 
it  may  as  well  be  said  that  all  knowledge  is  of  two  kinds,  — 
knowledge  of  Things  and  knowledge  of  Self.  Now  this  di- 
vision implies  a  most  wonderful  process  of  diremption  in 
conscious  states;  and  the  wonder  of  it  may  be  somewhat 
vividly  brought  before  us  in  the  following  way.  That  I 
should  know  myself  —  how  I  think,  and  feel,  and  what  I 
plan  —  is  indeed  fraught  with  all  the  mystery  which  is  in- 
separable from  the  nature  of  all  knowledge.  This  is  a 
mystery,  however,  which  seems  less  obvious  and  profound 
because  it  is  inconceivable  that  I  should  be  in  any  par- 
ticular "states  of  consciousness,"  as  we  are  accustomed  to 
say,  without  some  sort  of  kinship  between  me  and  my  own 
states.  I  am  certainly,  in  the  main,  like  myself,  whether  I 
consider  myself  as  the  subject  or  as  the  object  of  the  act  of 
knowledge.  As  psychologists  used  to  say:  In  the  case  of 
self-knowledge  the  object  is  a  subject-object,  whose  substan- 
tial identity  with  the  subject  is  affirmed  as  apparently  a 
necessary  part  of  the  very  act  of  knowledge.  But  in  the 
case  of  all  cognition  of  things,  our  experience  is,  in  some 
important  respects,  of  a  quite  different  order.  Here  the  ob- 
ject is  given  to  me,  by  the  act  of  cognition,  as  so  unlike 
me  that  I  call  it  a  "Thing,"  —  a  somewhat  not-me  because 
belonging,  as  known  by  me,  to  another  category  of  objects. 
And  however  much  one  may  become  confused  as  to  the  ac- 
curacy of  the  objective  reference  of  any  particular  modifi- 
cation of  the  sensation-content  or  the  feeling-content  of 
consciousness  (as,  for  example,  whether  the  sound  I  hear  is 
a  cricket  on  the  window-sill  or  a  tinnitus  aurium ;  whether 


208  KNOWLEDGE  OF  THINGS  AND  OF  SELF 

the  forms  I  see  are  insects  in  the  air  or  muscce  volitantes), 
one  never  thinks  of  the  possibility  of  confusing  one's  self 
with  other  things.  I  am;  and  my  world  of  object-things 
is, — such  is  the  twofold  division  of  all  that  is  real 
to  me. 

In  fact,  as  has  already  been  indicated,  the  implicate 
without  which  all  account  of  cognition  becomes  absurd,  even 
when  we  try  to  reduce  the  sum-total  of  assured  cognition  to 
the  lowest,  most  sceptical  and  agnostic  terms,  includes  the 
existence  of  things  as  different  examples  of  the  Not-me. 
You  and  I  can  never  communicate,  or  discuss,  our  several 
dogmatic  and  agnostic  positions,  without  somehow  paying 
each  other  the  compliment  to  assume  for  each  other  an 
extra-mental  existence.  But  I  always  remain  a  thing  for 
you,  as  I  am  most  immediately  known  by  you ;  and  I  am  in 
turn  obliged  to  say  —  begging  pardon  —  you  are  only  a  thing 
to  me.  How  now  can  this  mystery  be  brought  about  in  any 
such  manner  as  to  gain  credence  for  itself,  that  the  entire 
world  of  known  objects  with  the  sole  exception  of  the  Self, 
should  be  at  first  hand  known  as  so  unlike  the  Self  as  to  be 
assigned  to  an  opposite  and  even  contradictory  class  of 
objects  ?  For  all  knowledge  has  just  been  seen  to  have  the 
essential  nature  of  an  intercourse,  or  commerce,  between 
two,  —  a  relation  in  which  two  factors  unite  without  either 
losing  its  reality.  The  whole  half,  or,  for  mere  bulk,  three 
quarters  or  seven  eighths,  of  our  cognition  is,  then,  a  com- 
merce which  brings  us  into  a  living  relation  of  unity  with 
beings  that  are  by  nature  relegated  to  a  sphere  lying  quite 
out  of  immediate  conscious  reference.  What  wonder,  then, 
that  many  of  the  more  serious  students  of  the  problem  of 
knowledge  have  so  reacted  upon  this  fact  as  to  fall  back- 
wards into  the  gulf  of  an  identity-hypothesis ! 

It  is  interesting  to  notice,  however,  that  our  "  plain  man's  " 
consciousness  approves  of  no  such  backward  leap.  For  him 
the  surer  experience  is  what,  as  he  supposes,  he  immediately 


KNOWLEDGE  OF  THINGS  AND  OF  SELF  209 

and  indubitably  knows  about  the  nature  of  things.  He  is 
not  puzzled  as  to  whether  he  will  admit  terms  of  familiar 
acquaintance  between  himself  and  an  object  so  wholly  foreign 
in  origin  and  character  to  himself.  His  hesitations  and 
dubitations  arise,  if  at  all,  when  he  gets  a  moment's  time  to 
consider  more  reflectively  the  results  of  his  own  self-cog- 
nitions. Things  I  know;  and  their  relations  and  uses  I 
know,  —  of  course,  just  precisely  as  they  are ;  for  what  else 
than  this  does  knowledge  of  them  mean  ?  But  what  I  am, 
and  almost  whether  I  am,  except  at  those  rare  times  when  I 
attempt  a  brief,  face-to-face  acquaintance  with  myself,  are 
questions  which  seem  full  of  mystery.  And  by  the  "  Things  " 
which  he  thinks  he  surely  knows  as  they  actually  are,  he 
means  just  what  certain  psychologists  and  philosophers 
choose  to  call  "Things  as  they  seem,"  mere  "appearance" 
and  not  "reality." 

Moreover,  if  the  "  plain  man  "  becomes  a  careful  observer 
and  scientific  expert  in  respect  of  any  particular  class  of 
things,  while  retaining  the  plainness  of  his  unreflecting 
consciousness  in  respect  of  the  nature,  ground,  and  certitude 
of  his  knowledge  about  things,  he  remains  in  the  same 
happy  condition  of  uncritical  dogmatism  and  realism. 
Things  are  still  thought  actually  to  exist  as  they  seem;  but 
now  it  is  rather  as  they  seem  when  examined  by  the  modern 
improved  instrumentation,  — by  the  microscope  and  spectro- 
scope, and  by  the  various  methods  of  physical  and  chemical 
analysis.  And  when  the  more  direct  methods  of  determin- 
ing what  things  are  reach  their  natural  limit,  then  elaborate 
methods  of  ratiocination,  with  more  or  less  of  conjectured 
entities,  hypothetical  forces,  and  assumed  laws  of  action  and 
interaction,  are  summoned  in  the  interests  of  increasing  our 
common  stock  of  the  cognition  of  things.  All  this  seems 
to  the  man  of  science,  and  to  his  admirers,  very  true;  and 
if  any  particular  statement  lacks  the  evidence  necessary  to 
declare  it  true  (for  the  man  of  science  is  commendably  care- 

n 


210  KNOWLEDGE  OF  THINGS   AND  OF  SELF 

fu.1  about  his  evidence),  there  is  never  any  ultimate  doubt 
raised  as  to  the  objects  of  all  such  inquiry  having  a  real 
existence  after  patterns  cognizable  by  the  human  mind. 

It  is  important  to  notice  what  is  the  effect  upon  this  body 
of  knowledge  as  to  the  nature  and  behavior  of  things  which 
is  produced  by  the  sceptical  and  agnostic  outcome  of  the 
Kantian  epistemology.  If  any  one  who  holds  the  ordinary 
views,  whether  he  be  a  master  of  some  form  of  physical 
science  or  not,  be  told  that  it  is  his  own  intellect  which 
constructs  and  gives  objectivity  to  Nature,  to  the  systematic 
sum-total  of  really-existent  known  things,  he  may  finally  be 
forced  into  the  admission  that  the  reasoning  in  proof  of  this 
position  is  unanswerable.  He  may  even  himself  become  an 
easy  prey  for  that  form  of  idealism  which  Kant  strove  to 
render  untenable.  Admitting  the  transcendental  ideality  of 
all  things,  he  may,  in  the  strength  of  his  reaction  against 
the  na'ive  assumption  of  their  transcendental  reality,  fall  off 
into  the  extremes  of  phenomenalism.  But  as  man  of  science, 
he  will  always  return  to  the  position  that  scientific  knowl- 
edge is  of  things,  as  they  really  are  (things  —  non-egos,  not- 
selves).  Witness  the  late  Professor  Huxley,  who,  even 
aftsr  affirming  himself  a  Berkeleian  idealist  in  his  theory 
of  knowledge,  could  with  difficulty  write  five  pages  further 
without  returning  to  a  position  of  materialistic  realism  of 
the  most  uncritical  sort. 

The  reasons  for  the  strangely  inconsistent  behavior  of 
men,  when  their  theoretical  and  their  practical  attitudes 
toward  the  knowledge  of  things  are  compared,  might  easily 
be  given  from  the  psychological  point  of  view.  That  is  to 
say,  on  examination  it  can  readily  be  seen  why  some  of  the 
contents  of  consciousness  should  be  allotted  to  so-called 
Things  and  some  to  the  Self,  why  these  two  should  then  be 
set  in  contrast  by  the  mind  as  Ego  and  non-ego  ;  and  why  a 
sort  of  certitude  and  consistency  should  seem  to  belong  to 
the  latter  which  reaches  beyond  anything  that  the  Ego  itself 


KNOWLEDGE  OF  THINGS  AND   OF  SELF  211 

can  claim.  But  a  profounder  inquiry  into  the  import  of 
the  psychical  facts  shows  reasons  in  certain  trains  of  reflec- 
tive thinking  which  lead  to  another  conclusion  for  our  theory 
of  knowledge,  and  for  our  view  of  the  nature  of  reality  as 
well.  Things  are  immediately  and  certainly  known  as 
really  existsnt  objects  of  cognition  for  the  Self;  they  are 
known  as  so  differing  from  the  Self  that  they  cannot  be 
identified  or  confused  with  its  activities  or  its  states;  and 
yet  they  are  not  so  foreign  to  the  deeper  and  entire  nature 
of  the  Self  as  to  make  that  kind  of  commerce  or  intercourse 
called  knowledge  impossible  between  the  two. 

The  same  conditions  as  those  for  the  origin  of  the  distinc- 
tion between  subject  and  object  rule  over  the  further  distinc- 
tion between  Self  and  Things.  Out  of  the  same  stream  of 
conscious  life,  which  is  ever  determining  its  course  in 
accordance  with  its  own  nature  and  also  in  accordance  with 
the  configuration  of  the  territory  through  which  it  flows, 
this  latter  distinction  emerges.  Experience  is  a  sort  of 
unity ;  and  yet  it  divides  itself  into  internal  experience  and 
external  experience,  into  a  growth  of  cognitions  of  Self  and 
a  growth  of  cognitions  of  that  which  is  known  as  not-self. 
This  distinction  does  not,  indeed,  belong  to  the  beginning 
of  experience ;  but  neither  does  it  create  itself  as  an  act  of 
pure  caprice.  It  has  its  origin  in  the  nature  of  the  mind  as 
related  to  other  realities ;  and  yet  it  can  never  come  to  jt?«ss 
except  as  the  mind  itself,  by  its  own  discriminating,  segre- 
gating, and  unifying  activities,  brings  it  to  pass.  To  speak 
figuratively :  a  difference  in  the  "  stuff "  of  knowledge,  as 
furnished  out  of  the  store-house  of  Reality,  must  be  actively 
discerned  and  recognized  in  the  constructive  process  by  the 
builder  of  knowledge. 

Certain  of  the  sensation -contents  of  consciousness  are 
early  referred  to  that  sentient  and  bodily  Self  which  is  the 
child's  own,  and  certain  others  to  the  things  which  stand 
in  more  immediate  relation  to  this  self.  This  process  of 


212  KNOWLEDGE  OF  THINGS  AND  OF  SELF 

diremption  is  chiefly  conditioned  upon,  and  guided  by,  the 
character  of  those  feelings,  with  their  tone  of  pleasure  or 
pain,  which  fuse  with  and  constitute  an  inseparable  part  of 
the  sensation-contents.  With  the  infant,  the  inchoate  and 
ill-defined  Self  is  a  sort  of  aggregate  of  strong-toned  bodily 
sensations  and  feelings  of  obscure  localization,  set  in  con- 
trast with  and  changing  relation  to  the  better  defined  but 
much  less  feeling-full  sensations,  which  are  localized  and 
objectified  as  its  limited  world  of  things.  But  it  is  in  the 
actualized  relations  of  will  to  that  which  resists  will,  that 
the  process  of  diremption  becomes  most  acute  and  most 
pronounced.  In  the  melange  of  feelings  which  results  from 
the  movement  of  the  bodily  organs  in  manifold  relations  of 
pressure  and  contact,  or  absence  of  both,  amid  a  world  of 
things  external  to  these  organs,  certain  fixed  points  of  expe- 
rience and  groups  of  such  points  are  gradually  gained. 
Contemporaneously,  and  in  a  constant  process  of  interaction, 
two  strongly  marked  series  of  experiences  emerge  in  the  one 
experience.  On  this  basis  the  one  experience  becomes,  by 
activity  of  the  intellect,  dirempted.  It  is  no  longer  simply 
one  experience  as  belonging  to  the  subject  of  it  all,  but  a 
twofold  experience  with  Self  and  with  Things;  or  rather 
with  myself  in  changing  relations  to  many  different  things. 
The  chief  contents  of  one  aspect  of  this  experience,  which 
is  one,  yet  twofold,  are  a  certain  less  definitely  recognized 
group  of  interior  sensations,  having  a  strong  feeling-tone, 
and  found  to  be  dependent  upon  that  consciousness  of  self- 
activity  which  is  called  the  will.  The  chief  contents  of  the 
other  aspect  are  certain  different  and  more  definitely  recog- 
nized sensations,  mainly  of  sight  and  touch,  with  a  feeble 
tone  of  feeling,  and  found  to  be  relatively  independent  of 
the  modifications  in  that  consciousness  of  self-activity  which 
is  called  the  will.  But  the  very  core  of  the  former  is  this 
consciousness  of  self-activity,  of  will  in  action;  and  the 
very  core  of  the  latter  is  the  consciousness  of  being  re- 


KNOWLEDGE  OF  THINGS  AND  OF  SELF  213 

sisted,  of  will  as  encountering  something  that  "will-not," 
as  it  wills. 

All  this  is,  however,  only  a  description  of  different  phases 
or  aspects  of  the  one  mind  in  its  work  of  setting  part  of 
itself  over  against  itself.  It  only  furnishes,  therefore,  the 
grounds,  as  it  were,  on  which  the  mind  proceeds  to  divide  its 
own  experience  into  two  significantly  different  classes,  but 
without  recognizing  the  significance  of  its  own  procedure ; 
and  to  assign  these  classes  to  two  opposed  subjects.  In  order 
now  to  understand  and  validate  this  diremptive  process  as 
genuine  cognition,  as  the  setting-forth  in  consciousness  of 
what  is  true,  because  the  process  in  consciousness  has  its 
correlate  in  the  nature  and  changes  of  the  trans-subjective 
Reality,  something  must  be  done  more  than  merely  to  give 
the  description  of  the  process  itself.  All  that  can  possibly 
be  done,  however,  is  to  show  that  the  procedure  of  the 
mind  legitimately  makes  the  claims  which  belong  to  every 
genuinely  cognitive  process ;  in  brief,  that  we  are  here  deal- 
ing with  a  case  of  knowledge,  and  not  of  mere  sensation, 
or  mere  imaging,  or  mere  thinking,  or  sheer  belief.  In 
order  to  show  this  clearly  it  is  only  necessary  to  analyze 
any  genuine  act  of  perception,  which  reaches  the  stage  of 
cognition  of  a  "Thing."  There  is  the  object,  posited  as 
actual  and  with  an  indubitable  conviction,  and  assuredly 
standing  in  that  relation  to  the  cognizing  subject  which 
is  of  the  very  essence  of  knowledge.  Moreover,  with  an 
equally  indubitable  conviction  is  this  object  posited  as  not 
a  subject-object,  as  not  a  state  of  the  self,  but  as  an  object- 
object,  an  actually  existent  form  of  the  not-me. 

If  now,  from  the  point  of  view  of  the  cognizing  subject, 
thorough  examination  be  made  of  its  process  or  state,  includ- 
ing the  character  of  the  judgment  in  which  the  criticism  of 
the  content  of  consciousness  terminates,  this  process  or  state 
will  be  found  to  have  every  characteristic  of  a  finished  and 
assured  cognition.  In  it  all  the  intellectual  activities  neces- 


214  KNOWLEDGE  OF  THINGS  AND   OF  SELF 

sary  to  cognition  are  involved;  it  is  feeling-full,  and,  on 
being  called  in  question,  speedily  develops  that  warmth  of 
conviction,  and  that  grasp  of  the  willing  Self  upon  the 
actuality  of  its  object,  which  are  the  marks  of  an  act  of 
cognition.  But  especially  is  it  true  that,  if  by  repeated 
acts  of  volition,  amounting  finally  to  the  extremest  possible 
assertion  of  the  will  of  the  knower,  the  attempt  be  made 
to  determine  the  non-reality  of  the  external  object,  the 
attempt  ends  in  failure.  Indeed,  so  true  is  this  that  we 
can  give  no  more  impressive  and  truthful,  albeit  figurative, 
description  of  what  we  know  this  object  to  be  than  to  say : 
"We  know  it  is  as  Will  opposed  to,  and  yet  holding  com- 
merce with,  our  Will." 

Whatever  psychology  teaches,  by  way  of  fact  or  by  way  of 
theory,  concerning  errors  of  sense,  illusions  and  delusions 
and  hallucinations,  of  various  kinds  and  many  degrees,  has 
absolutely  no  bearing  on  the  validity  of  the  knowledge  of 
things,  as  thus  far  expounded.  For  the  question  now  under 
consideration  does  not  concern  ihe  psycho-physical  origin  of 
the  sensation-content  or  the  feeling-content  of  the  objects  of 
sense-perception.  Neither  does  it  concern  the  accuracy  of 
the  intellectual  processes  involved  in  the  localization  and 
projection,  in  a  mentally  constructed  world  of  space-rela- 
tions, of  the  various  forms  of  these  contents.  Nor,  finally, 
does  the  present  question  concern  the  range  and  validity  of 
our  knowledge  of  things  —  as  to  what  they  actually  are  — 
through  sense-perception.  The  undisturbed  truth  of  experi- 
ence is  simply  this:  Upon  a  basis  of  differing  elements  in 
our  originally  united  but  inchoate  experience,  an  accom- 
plished diremption  of  the  objects  of  experience  into  Things 
and  Self  must  be  recognized  as  having  all  the  characteris- 
tics of  knowledge;  and,  moreover,  the  actuality  of  things, 
as  not-self,  is  immediately  and  indubitably  given  in  our 
cognitive  experience  of  them. 

The  shifting  way  in  which  we  are  obliged  to  use  terms  for 


KNOWLEDGE  OF  THINGS   AND   OF   SELF  215 

the  two  objects  of  cognitive  experience  is  largely,  but  not 
wholly,  responsible  for  the  sceptical  and  agnostic  conclu- 
sion regarding  the  possibility  of  knowing  the  real  being  of 
things.  This  shifting  use  is  itself  determined  largely,  but 
not  wholly,  by  the  actual  growth  of  experience.  For  this 
growth  of  experience  itself  is  a  growth  in  our  knowledge 
both  of  Self  and  of  Things.  It  involves,  therefore,  neces- 
sarily, a  change  in  the  contents  of  our  conceptions  answering 
to  the  words  "Things"  and  "Self."  In  the  earlier  develop- 
ments of  knowledge  for  all  men,  in  most  acts  of  knowledge 
for  many  men,  and  in  some  acts  of  knowledge  for  all  men, 
the  spheres  connoted  by  these  two  words  overlap.  For 
example,  all  the  members  of  one's  body  may  be  regarded  — • 
even  the  most  interior  and  psychologically  insensitive  and 
yet  supremely  important  of  them,  like  the  cerebral  hemi- 
spheres —  either  as  things  standing  in  a  peculiarly  intimate 
relation  to  the  Self,  or  as  veritable  parts  of  the  Self.  Thus 
we  may  say  either,  "I  have  headache,"  or,  "My  head  pains 
me."  The  headache  I  have  is  indubitably  a  state  of  the 
Ego,  the  subject  or  possessor  of  which  I  declare  myself 
to  be.  Suppose  the  localization  to  be  inexact,  it  does  not 
affect  the  validity  of  the  cognition  which  affirms  the  pain, 
and  which  ascribes  it  to  the  Ego  as  its  pain.  But  the  head 
which  gives  me  pain  is  either  perceived  or  conceived  of  as 
a  thing  which  is  not-Ego,  but  which  stands  in  a  peculiar 
relation  to  the  Ego  on  account  of  its  ability  to  cause  a  pain, 
having  such  characteristics  and  being  so  localized.  The 
peculiarity  of  the  relation,  and  any  confusion  as  to  the 
particular  thing  which  stands  in  this  relation,  do  not  at 
all  affect  the  fundamental  conditions  on  which  it  is  given 
to  me  as  a  thing.  As  "a  Thing,"  even  if  it  be  my  own 
brain,  it  is  conceived  of  by  me  and  perceived  by  others  as 
an  actually  existent  somewhat  that  refuses  to  be  identified 
with  the  Self. 

In  brief,  in  clear-cut  scientific  cognition  and  in  the  veriest 


216  KNOWLEDGE  OF  THINGS  AND  OF  SELF 

hallucinations,  in  the  sanest  acts  of  the  soundest  minds  and 
in  the  ravings  of  the  mad-house  or  the  vagaries  of  "  double  " 
and  "  multiple  "  consciousness,  this  distinction  in  the  char- 
acter of  the  objects  of  cognition  is  maintained  as  a  funda- 
mental distinction.  Things  and  Self  cannot  be  identified; 
neither  can  they  both  be  sunk  in  a  third  somewhat  which  is 
conceived  of  after  a  pattern  drawn  from  analogies  afforded 
by  neither  of  the  two.1  They  can  be  unified  in  reality,  as 
they  certainly  are  in  some  sort  unified  in  every  act  of  com- 
pleted sense-perception  (and  this  is  matter  of  unquestionable 
experience),  if  at  all,  only  if  the  conception  of  one  of  the 
two  —  either  of  Thing  or  of  Self  —  can  be  so  extended  in  a 
valid  way  as  to  provide  an  explanation  for  the  other,  and 
for  the  relation  of  knowledge  between  the  two.  The  solu- 
tion of  this  problem,  as  a  problem  in  ontology,  takes  us 
into  the  realm  of  general  metaphysics  and  even  of  the  phi- 
losophy of  religion.  As  a  problem  in  epistemology,  we  shall 
have  occasion  to  refer  to  it  again. 

Beyond  that  narrow  but  solid  ground  for  standing  from 
which  is  affirmed  the  actuality  of  things  as  not -self,  and  the 
actuality  of  the  Self  as  given  in  the  relation  of  the  very  act 
of  cognition,  the  cases  of  the  two  differ  widely.  The  con- 
ception of  the  Self  grows  in  the  soil  of  immediate  or  intui- 
tive knowledge,  and  it  is  worthy  to  be  called  an  indubitable 
envisagement  of  Reality;  but  the  conception  of  things,  of 
their  real  nature  and  their  actual  relations,  is  shown  to  be 
developed  from  an  assumption  which  has  only  the  value  of 
an  analogy;  but  which,  if  this  entire  sphere  of  cognition  is 
to  be  made  valid,  needs  itself  to  be  criticised  and  defended 
against  sceptical  attacks.  Anticipating  more  ultimate  con- 
clusions, and  speaking  strictly,  it  must  be  said  that  the 
definite  and  concrete  conceptions  we  find  ourselves  obliged 
(or  "  privileged  "  ?)  to  form  of  Things,  amount  to  a  knowledge 
of  their  real  nature  only  as  a  certain  assumption  is  made 

1  Philosophy  of  Mind,  chapter  viii. 


KNOWLEDGE  OF  THINGS  AND  OF  SELF  217 

valid.  This  assumption  concerns  the  right  to  conceive  of 
things  after  the  analogy  of  our  immediate  and  indubitable 
knowledge  of  the  Self. 

It  may  be  questioned  by  the  defender  of  the  current  naive 
metaphysics  of  physics  —  either  popular  or  scientific  — 
whether  men  do  actually  conceive  of  Things  only  after  the 
analogy  of  the  known  Self.  If  this  were  so,  how  could  men 
be  so  sure  that  things  are  woZ-selves  ?  Now  the  complete 
answer  to  the  former  question  requires  several  chapters  in 
metaphysics,  of  a  critical  and  scientific  order  as  opposed  to 
that  naive  thinking  in  which  the  question  itself  arises.  But 
the  answer  to  the  latter  question  comes  from  a  combined 
study  of  psychology  and  of  the  history  of  human  reflection. 
This  history  shows  that  while  men  never  confuse  Self  with 
other  things,  they  do,  in  their  early  development  as  individ- 
ual men,  and  also  in  the  early  developments  of  the  race, 
conceive  of  things  quite  generally  after  the  very  patent 
analogy  of  the  Self.  That  is  to  say,  children  and  unculti- 
vated folk  of  adult  years  personify  things.  In  doing  this 
they  impart  to  them,  not  only  those  ideas  and  voluntary 
activities  which  seem  necessary  to  account  for  their  purpose- 
ful behavior,  but  also  an  entire  outfit  of  feelings,  passions, 
and  desires,  or  even  of  more  lofty  intellectual  and  aesthetical 
sentiments,  such  as  seems  necessary  to  a  rich,  content-full 
and  valuable  existence.  Excited  and  guided  in  this  manner, 
the  religions  of  men  have  developed  themselves  all  the  way 
from  the  lowest  form  of  fetichism  to  the  more  refined  wor- 
ship of  Nature.  The  consolations  which  a  feeling  of  kin- 
ship with  the  system  of  things  administers,  and  the  dread 
and  bondage  of  that  superstition  which  this  way  of  consid- 
ering things  engenders,  have  arisen  from  the  same  habit  of 
mind.  Take  away  from  art  the  personification  of  the  trans- 
subjective,  through  the  projection  of  the  image  of  the  subjec- 
tive, and  its  moving  spirit  and  most  valued  achievements 
would  disappear  together;  as  the  psychology  and  philosophy 
of  aesthetics  abundantly  show. 


218  KNOWLEDGE   OF   THINGS   AND   OF   SELF 

It  is  the  impression  of  persons  with  cultivated  scientific 
proclivities,  but  without  much  genuine  insight  into  the 
processes  and  significance  of  science,  that  our  present 
knowledge  of  things  has  attained  the  power  to  surrender  the 
necessity,  and  disprove  the  applicability,  of  the  aforesaid 
personification  of  things.  And,  indeed,  most  of  the  naivete* 
has  departed,  with  its  poetic  charm,  before  the  common- 
sense  and  the  science  of  modern  peoples  in  their  investiga- 
tions of  natural  objects.  Let  it  not  be  supposed,  however, 
that  the  sphere  of  immediate  and  sure  intuition  into  Nature 
has  been  enlarged  in  this  way,  or  that  the  necessity  for 
rendering  all  our  conceptual  information  into  terms  whose 
real  meaning  is  derived  from  face-to-face  experiences  of  the 
soul  has  been  diminished.  The  thoughtful  physicist  is 
still  forced  to  confess  that  he  has  attained  no  valid  insight 
into  the  interior  construction  of  Things;  he  can  only  tell 
you  his  generalizations  as  to  how  they  appear  to  behave. 
The  scientific  character  of  the  information  he  is  ready  to 
impart  consists  in  the  nearer  approach  to  a  mathematical 
exactness  for  the  formulas  which  mark  the  characteristic 
and  uniform  modes  of  this  behavior.  And  should  he  venture 
upon  the  hard  task  of  giving  to  these  formulas  the  most 
scientific  representation  possible,  — for  example,  in  a  learned 
treatise  upon  physics  or  chemistry,  —  he  is  likely  to  begin 
by  confessing  that  "what  Matter  really  is,"  we  do  not  know, 
and  probably  never  shall  know.  At  this  point  it  belongs  to 
the  thinker  who  sees  beyond  physics  into  metaphysics,  to 
relieve  'the  physicist  from  the  burden  of  his  excessive 
modesty  by  pointing  out  to  him  that  we  can  tell  what  any 
"subjects  of  states"  really  are,  only  by  telling  what  they 
most  uniformly  and  consistently  do ;  and  then  to  reveal  the 
profound  truth  that  all  the  choicest,  most  impersonal  terms 
for  even  the  physical  characteristics  of  matter,  if  any  mean- 
ing realizable  in  experience  is  to  be  given  to  them,  must  be 
recognized  as  abstractions  from  the  immediate  experience  of 
the  Self  with  itself. 


KNOWLEDGE   OF  THINGS  AND  OF  SELF  219 

Before  this  view  of  the  significant  difference  between  the 
knowledge  of  Things  and  the  knowledge  of  Self  is  enforced 
by  instancing  a  few  of  the  more  important  particulars,  atten- 
tion is  called  to  the  popular  way  of  looking  upon  the  entire 
problem.  This  shows  clearly  that  the  distinction  between 
selves  and  things  is  of  a  quite  different  order  from  the  dis- 
tinction between  the  Self  and  that  which  is  immediately 
known  as  not-self.  In  other  words,  the  diremption  of  the 
cognitive  process  which  gives  to  immediate  consciousness, 
in  an  intuitive  way,  two  unmistakably  different  classes  of 
objects,  Self  and  Things,  is  much  more  fundamental  than 
that  which  results  in  classifying  all  things  into  other-selves 
and  things  which  are  not-selves.  In  knowing  you,  or  in 
knowing  the  tree,  the  stone,  the  star,  I  immediately  and 
indubitably  cognize  the  object  as  a  somewhat  really  existent 
which  is  not-me,  but  which  is  in  the  peculiar  relation  of 
commerce  or  intercourse  with  me,  that  renders  it  an  object 
of  my  knowledge.  But  whether  this  object  is  now  to  be 
classified  among  the  "  not-mes  "  which  are  conceived  of  as 
other-selves,  or  among  the  "not-mes"  which  are  conceived 
of  as  things  in  the  sense  of  being  also  "not-selves,"  is  a 
further  problem  for  cognition.  And  it  is  a  problem  of  a 
quite  different  order.  It  is  a  problem  which  can  never  be 
solved  except  provisionally  and  with  a  lowered  degree  of 
assurance  as  to  the  truthfulness  of  the  answer.  Witness 
how  the  whole  world  of  observers  is  divided  over  the  ques- 
tion of  the  limits  in  application  for  the  various  characteris- 
tics of  the  life  of  consciousness  and  self-consciousness. 
Books  on  "the  psychic  life  of  micro-organisms,"  or  "the 
soul-life  of  plants,"  or  the  universally  present  "mind-stuff," 
by  aggregation  of  which  the  human  mind  is  sometimes 
supposed  to  be  satisfactorily  explained,  startle,  at  first,  the 
so-called  common-sense  of  men.  But,  then,  they  also  excite 
a  pleased  curiosity ;  and  they  often  end  in  convincing  their 
readers  that  the  old-time  mythological  way  of  looking  at 


220  KNOWLEDGE  OF  THINGS  AND  OF  SELF 

things  was  not  so  palpably  absurd  after  all.  For,  perhaps, 
men  nowadays  have  grown,  under  the  influence  of  devotion 
to  impersonal  entities  and  bare  mathematical  formulas,  too 
jealous  of  the  priceless  gift  of  consciousness,  and  too  ready 
to  claim  it  all  for  that  species  of  animals  to  which  they 
themselves  belong.  That  the  reasons  on  which  the  modern 
theory  of  evolution  has  built  up  this  sort  of  distinctions 
are  very  "shaky  "  may  well  be  admitted  by  any  one  who  has 
experimented  with  the  spinal  cord  of  a  headless  frog,  or  who 
has  patiently  observed  the  behavior  of  the  tendrils  of  climb- 
ing plants. 

If,  however,  the  proposal  is  once  made  to  extend  the  work 
which  is  critical  of  differentiations  so  as  to  undermine  the 
very  distinction  on  which  knowledge  itself  is  based,  we  are 
met  by  a  totally  different  order  of  resistance.  Such  a  work 
of  destructive  criticism,  if  accomplished,  would  bring  down 
the  whole  house  of  human  science  upon  our  heads.  But 
this  has  already  been  made  sufficiently  clear  for  the  present ; 
and  it  is  time  to  turn  our  critical  inquiries  in  another 
direction. 

What  it  is  really  to  be  a  Self,  we  have  made  the  subject 
of  detailed  inquiry  in  other  connections.1  It  may  suffice  in 
this  connection  to  say  that  the  description  of  such  a  reality 
can  only  be  given  in  terms  of  self-consciousness.  It  is  only 
what  I  am  for  myself  to  know  that  can  define  what  I  really 
am  as  a  Self.  Of  course,  then,  other  selves  must  be  known 
to  me  only  by  interpretation  of  signs,  conceptually,  and  as 
constructed  after  the  pattern  of  my  own  self-known  Self. 
The  existence  of  such  other  selves  is  an  implicate  of  cogni- 
tion, just  so  soon  as  cognition  undertakes  to  be  communi- 
cative, —  even  if  (and  especially  if)  the  communication  be 
argumentative  in  the  interests  of  a  thorough  scepticism  or 
a  despairing  agnosticism.  It  is  an  implicate,  however, 
which  involves  in  its  origin  and  application  a  complicated 

1  Philosophy  of  Mind,  especially  chapters  iii.-vi. 


KNOWLEDGE  OF  THINGS  AND   OF   SELF  221 

experience,  both  of  the  so-called  intuitive  and  of  the  con- 
ceptual kind.  To  most  of  the  animals  and  possibly  to  the 
plants  and  to  so-called  "mind-stuff,"  men  are  accustomed 
to  ascribe  some  of  the  lower  forms  of  consciousness,  but 
without  ascribing  those  higher  forms  of  self-consciousness 
the  possession  and  actualizing  of  which  are  deemed  neces- 
sary to  entitle  any  being  to  be  called  "a  Self,"  in  the  full 
meaning  of  that  term. 

There  remains  now  that  class  of  objects  of  our  cognition 
which  are  known  as  not-selves,  in  any  assignable  meaning 
of  the  word  "Self,"  but  rather  as  things  in  the  most  com- 
plete assignable  meaning  of  the  word  "Thing."  Of  these 
beings,  too,  all  human  knowledge,  beyond  that  very  narrow 
but  solid  basis  which  has  already  been  distinguished  as 
implicate  in  the  way  in  which  they  are  given  as  objects  of 
our  more  immediate  apprehension,  is,  of  course,  conceptual 
knowledge.  This  conceptual  knowledge  of  mere  things  is 
of  two  kinds,  negative  and  positive.  As  negative,  it  con- 
sists in  denying  to  things  certain  of  the  characteristics 
which  selves  are  conceived  of  as  having,  —  perhaps,  in  the 
extreme  case,  in  denying  any  faintest  semblance  of  con- 
sciousness, even  such  as,  according  to  Leibnitz,  every  monad 
must  possess  in  order  to  exist  at  all.  But  the  positive  char- 
acteristics which  things  are  conceived  of  as  having  are  all 
abstractions  from  the  definite,  concrete,  and  intuitive  knowl- 
edge of  the  Self  by  itself. 

Suppose,  for  example,  that  one  maintains  the  substan- 
tiality of  things,  or  rather  of  that  substrate  of  all  particular 
things  which  is  called  "  Matter, "  and  in  which,  in  a  moment 
of  great  enthusiasm,  a  celebrated  student  of  physics  dis- 
cerned "the  promise  and  potency"  of  every  form  of  life. 
"  Matter, "  as  a  word,  signifies  only,  as  all  admit,  an  ab- 
straction. But  what  is  it,  in  reality  to  continue  to  be,  —  to 
exist  substantially,  while  the  modes  or  manifestations  of  the 
existence  are  continually  being  changed  ?  No  answer  can 


222  KNOWLEDGE  OF  THINGS   AND  OF  SELF 

be  given  to  this  question  which  is  not  framed  after  the 
analogy  of  the  experience  of  the  Self  with  itself,  as  the  self- 
recognized  subject  of  its  own  changing  states.  Only  as  the 
subject  of  knowledge,  the  knower,  comes  to  the  recognition  of 
his  own  claim  to  have  in  some  sort  a  real  and  permanent  being, 
not  simply  "  in  spite  of,"  but  in  and  through  his  own  changes, 
can  he  attach  to  things  any  meaning-full  conception  of  a 
substantial  existence.1  Thus  the  substantiality,  or  permanent 
existence  in  reality,  of  any  particular  external  object  is 
always  hypothetical  and  depends  upon  the  validity  of  concep- 
tual thinking.  Substantiality,  or  permanent  existence  for 
the  Self,  so  far  as  it  can  be  claimed  to  be  known,  is  given  in 
the  form  of  an  immediate  and  indisputable  intuition,  in  every 
act  of  self-conscious  cognition.  And  the  validity  of  the  hy- 
pothesis by  which  we  extend  the  conception  of  substantiality 
to  things  depends  upon  the  truthfulness  of  the  assumption 
that,  after  the  analogy  of  our  own  experience,  things  may 
be  considered  as  in  reality  permanent  subjects  of  changing 
states.  Otherwise  the  bond  that  holds  them  together  is 
merely  subjective ;  and  we  must  adopt  Berkeley's  esse  est 
percipi,  or  a  modification  of  John  Stuart  Mill's  view,  and 
resolve  the  substantiality  of  things  into  our  "  belief "  in 
the  possibility  of  having  a  particular  series  of  sensations 
repeated. 

If,  again,  inquiry  be  made  into  the  grounds  and  the  charac- 
ter of  the  knowledge  of  things  as  particular,  and  as  standing 
in  definite  relations  to  each  other,  the  same  conclusion  fol- 
lows. All  such  knowledge  also  is  conceptual ;  and  the  form  of 

1  Kaulich  maintains  that  inasmuch  as,  in  the  last  instance,  all  knowledge  de- 
pends upon  the  subject's  thought  of  itself,  and  this  thought  is  a  demonstration 
of  the  reality  of  the  subject,  and  receives  from  this  its  content,  such  an  act  of 
thought  (durch  sich  selbst  gewisse)  is  not  to  be  apprehended  as  merely  a  formal 
act,  but  that  a  metaphysical  signification  belongs  to  it,  besides  the  certainty  of 
the  existence  of  the  subject  which  is  given  through  it.  In  self-consciousness, 
then,  we  have  the  bridge  which  leads  over  from  the  domain  of  merely  formal 
thinking  into  the  domain  of  the  real.  See  Ueber  die  MSglichkeit,  das  Ziel,  und 
die  Grenzen  des  Wissens,  pp.  21  f. 


KNOWLEDGE  OF  THINGS  AND  OF  SELF  223 

the  concepts  bears  in  each  instance  the  unmistakable  tokens 
of  resemblance  to  their  parent,  the  mind.  In  recognition  of 
this  truth,  Wundt,1  when  treating  of  the  distinction  between 
particular  objects  and  the  self-distinction  of  the  subject, 
remarks  :  "  The  circumstance  that  the  thinking  subject  knows 
itself  as  one  of  these  objects,  and  that  it  is  conscious  of  its 
independent  existence  (Selbststandigkeif)  through  its  own 
voluntary  motion  is  manifestly  here  (that  is,  in  the  distinc- 
tion of  external  objects)  of  decisive  influence  upon  the  elab- 
oration of  external  perceptions."  By  following  out  the  same 
line  of  thinking  we  discover  that  the  "  natures  "  ascribed  to 
different  things  are  only  the  conceptual  modes  of  their  self- 
activity  in  changing  relations  to  other  things.  That  the 
hidden  qualities  and  forces  with  which  we  endow  things  — 
especially  the  possession  of  "force"  in  general,  or  of  some 
"  mode  of  energy  "  —  are  conceptions  abstracted  from  our 
experience  as  self-active  in  relation  to  the  objects  of  our 
cognition,  has  been  pointed  out  so  clearly,  and  so  often,  that 
it  would  be  inexcusable  to  repeat  the  argument  here.  Indeed, 
we  have  just  seen  how  in  the  complex  operations  of  what  we 
call  "  Will "  as  connected  with  sense-perception,  there  is 
involved  the  mental  representation  of  a  real  being  for  things, 
and  of  a  reciprocal  action  between  subject  and  object.  And 
if  the  empty  term  "  Energy,"  or  "  Force,"  be  displaced  by  a 
word  which  has  a  meaning  representable  in  some  concrete, 
actual  experience,  such  word  is  found  to  signify  our  immedi- 
ate knowledge  of  ourselves  as  wills.  For  all  has  been  said 
regarding  the  nature  of  things  that  can  be  said  from  this 
standpoint  merely,  when  the  same  self-derived  conception  is 
applied  to  them,  and  they  are  called  "  other-Will." 

The  epistemological  doctrine  of  perception  by  the  senses 
as  the  primary  form  of  the  cognition  of  things  emphasizes  the 
same  important  truths.  We  may  properly  follow  Zeller2  in 

1  System  der  Philosophic,  pp.  134  f. 

8  Vortrage  und  Abhandlungen,  iii.,  pp.  225  f. 


224  KNOWLEDGE  OF  THINGS  AND  OF  SELF 

his  analysis  and  attempt  to  show  the  very  constitution  of 
our  perceptions  to  be  such  that,  from  whatever  direction  we 
may  approach  them,  we  unavoidably  plunge  ourselves  into 
hopeless  obscurities  and  contradictions,  if  we  do  not  refer  our 
mental  representations  to  subjects  that  are  different  from 
ourselves  and,  so  far  forth,  external  to  us.  We  may  even  go 
much  further  and  show  that  it  belongs  inseparably  to  the  sense- 
perceptions  of  man  to  have  fused  with  them,  as  an  organic 
and  integrating  factor,  the  irresistible  conviction  of  a  Reality 
apprehended  and  belonging  to  the  objects  of  his  perceptive 
acts.  Perception  believes,  and  must  believe,  in  itself  as  an 
indubitable  experience  of  the  trans-subjective.  It  is  not  an 
arbitrary,  it  is  not  even  a  voluntary  or  an  avoidable  affair, 
that  we  interpret  the  collective  content  of  our  perceptive  acts 
into  a  cognition  of  the  trans-subjective.  And  if  a  distinction 
be  made  between  perception  and  cognition,  and  between  the 
character  and  the  amounts  of  the  real  given  in  these  two  men- 
tal processes,  it  must  still  be  admitted  that  the  only  fully 
justifiable  means  and  first  source  of  all  knowledge  of  things 
is  to  be  found  in  perception.  The  instant,  however,  the 
implicates  of  perception  are  extended  beyond  the  bare  mental 
positing  of  a  really  existent  somewhat  which  is  given  there- 
and-now  as  a  not-me,  the  total  cognition  can  be  enlarged 
only  in  terms  of  mind-life.  Perceptive  cognition  is  inter- 
pretative of  mind-life.  What  the  Thing  is  becomes  known 
to  us  only  so  far  as  we  are  prepared  to  consider  it  as  a  man- 
ifestation of  the  presence  and  power  of  mind-life. 

Moreover,  as  perceptive  cognition  grows,  by  repeated  and 
intelligent  applications  to  it  of  the  power  of  reflective  think- 
ing, the  sphere  of  the  assured  knowledge  (or  science}  of  things 
increases.  This  knowledge  becomes  more  and  more  concep- 
tual. Things  are  more  and  more  endowed  with  attributes  and 
powers  which  our  enlarging  perceptive  experience  of  them 
seems  to  require  for  its  own  most  satisfactory  interpretation 
and  remoter  explanation.  The  problematical  "somewhat" 


KNOWLEDGE  OF  THINGS  AND  OF  SELF  225 

which  is  primarily  known  as  posited,  felt  to  be  irresistibly 
believed  in,  and  grasped  upon  by  an  act  of  will  that  finds  itself 
resisted,  further  defines  itself  as  having  an  abiding  reality 
most  manifold  and  full  of  content.  But  in  all  this  growth  of 
knowledge  there  is  a  most  important  difference  between  the 
knowledge  of  Things  and  the  knowledge  of  Self.  In  the  latter 
kind  of  knowledge  there  is  no  transcendental  limitation,  or 
merely  figurative  employment  of  abstract  concepts  which  ex- 
perience has  no  means  of  filling  with  the  concrete  and  clearly 
cognized  reality.  In  the  knowledge  of  Self  "  no  distinction 
can  be  made  between  a  thing-in-itself  and  a  phenomenon.  .  .  . 
I  know  reality  as  it  is  itself,  in  so  far  as  I  am  that  reality 
myself." l  Self-knowledge  is  always  an  envisagement  of  real- 
ity, or  an  interpretation  of  some  experience  which  is  an 
envisagement  of  reality.  But  the  case  with  the  knowledge 
of  things  is  far  different.  That  the  really  existent  is  known 
must  indeed  be  affirmed  in  both  cases ;  and  that  the  really  ex- 
istent is  known  as  not-me  is  true  of  all  cognitions  of  things. 
It  does  not  follow,  thereupon,  that  the  further  qualifications 
in  reality,  of  Things  and  of  Self,  are  known  either  to  the 
same  extent  or  in  the  same  way.  On  the  contrary,  all  the 
further  qualifications  of  things  are  known  only  conceptually 
and  as  the  projections  into  things,  so  to  speak,  of  the  immedi- 
ately known  qualifications  of  the  Self. 

We  sum  up  the  long  discussion  of  this  very  difficult  sub- 
ject in  the  following  statement  of  truths  which  it  is  intended 
by  repetition  to  make  clear.  Knowledge,  by  its  very  nature, 
validates  in  reality  the  distinction  between  subject  and  object. 
Even  in  that  form  of  cognition  which  is  called  the  knowledge 
of  Self,  this  distinction  is  not  to  be  overlooked  or  explained 
away.  Self-consciousness  attains  a  knowledge  of  the  Self, 
as  acting  subject  of  changing  states,  and  yet  as  objectively 

1  On  this  whole  matter  compare  the  author's  "  Philosophy  of  Mind,"  chapters 
iv.  and  v.,  and  Paulsen,  "  Introduction  to  Philosophy,"  p.  367,  from  whom  the 
sentence  above  is  quoted. 

15 


226  KNOWLEDGE  OF  THINGS  AND  OF  SELF 

determined  otherwise  than  by  its  own  conscious  activity.  It 
is  thus  a  cognition  of  Self  as  both  active  and  passive,  —  as  a 
real  being,  in  an  objectively  constituted  and  determined  sys- 
tem of  beings.  But  cognition,  by  its  very  nature,  also  vali- 
dates the  distinction  in  objects  between  Self  and  '  not-self. 
This  distinction,  too,  must  be  accepted  as  valid  in  reality  and 
independent  of  our  activity,  whether  in  thinking  or  in  any 
other  form  of  action.  The  distinction  is  given  as  belonging 
to  that  diremptive  process  which  is  lost  in  the  origins  of  our 
conscious  life,  but  which  is  so  fundamental,  incisive,  and 
insistent  that  it  cannot  be  separated  from  the  development 
of  knowledge  itself. 

On  the  basis  of  yet  more  complicated  and  doubtful  infer- 
ences, we  distinguish  that  entire  world  of  objects  which  are 
noi-the-Self  into  groups  that  either  claim  or  are  denied  the 
possession  of  the  characteristics  we  know  ourselves  to  have. 
Thus,  a  coarse  and  doubtful,  yet  practically  useful  and,  to  a 
large  extent  scientifically  defensible,  secondary  distinction  is 
made  ;  and  all  the  objects  not  recognized  as  our  Self  are 
divided  into  other  selves  and  other  things.  But  both  for 
other  selves,  and  for  other  realities  that  are  not  selves  but 
are  things,  no  further  conceptual  qualifications  are  possible 
but  such  as  are  derived  from  the  same  immediate  experience 
with  the  Self.  These  two  kinds  of  beings  are  thus  separated, 
negatively,  by  denying  to  one  of  them  certain  likenesses  to 
the  Self  which  we  affirm  the  other  to  possess.  But  all  posi- 
tive knowledge,  all  the  qualifications  which  can  be  interpreted 
in  terms  of  actual,  concrete  experience,  are  in  both  cases  taken 
from  the  same  source.  What  other  selves  are  is  known  only 
because  we  immediately  and  assuredly  know  what  our  own 
Self  is. 

But  what  things  that  are  not-selves  really  are,  we  can  only 
tell  by  a  series  of  purely  negative  concepts,  unless  we  are 
satisfied  to  affirm  that,  in  some  respects  at  least,  all  things 
are  positively  like  ourselves.  So  that  the  truth  of  all  human 


KNOWLEDGE  OF  THINGS  AND  OF  SELF  227 

conceiving  of  things  depends  upon  the  right  to  maintain  some 
sort  of  important  kinship,  as  an  accompaniment  and  off-set, 
as  it  were,  to  a  certain  number  of  vaguely  conceived  and 
shifting  differences  between  Things  and  Self.  To  affirm  a 
complete  identity  between  the  two  is,  therefore,  to  contradict 
the  plainest  content  of  all  knowledge,  whether  as  given  in  inter- 
pretative perception,  or  in  the  scientific  conception,  of  things. 
But  so  to  separate  the  two  as  to  make  the  commerce  of  knowl- 
edge between  them  impossible,  is  to  set  up  an  unwarrantable 
dualism  on  the  basis  of  a  difference  which  the  analysis  of  the 
cognition  of  things  shows  not  to  exist.  For,  finally,  while 
the  knowledge  of  Self  may  attain  an  intuitive  penetration 
to  the  heart  of  Reality,  the  knowledge  of  Things  remains  an 
analogical  interpretation  of  their  apparent  behavior  into  terms 
of  a  real  nature  corresponding,  in  important  characteristics,  to 
our  own.  The  cognition  of  the  world  of  things  by  the  human 
mind  actually  takes  place  with  the  passionate  and  determined 
assumption  of  a  right  to  know  what  things  really  are.  The 
admission  of  this  right  extends  and  validates  our  system  of 
concepts  relating  to  things.  It  is,  therefore,  an  assumption 
of  the  highest  epistemological  value.  We  shall  return  to  it 
again. 


CHAPTER  VIII 

DEGREES,  LIMITS,  AND  KINDS,  OF  KNOWLEDGE 

SEVERAL  questions  which,  although  they  often  constitute 
the  principal  matter  of  heated  epistemological  discus- 
sion, are  really  of  only  subordinate  importance,  may  fitly  be 
gathered  together  under  the  title  placed  at  the  head  of  this 
chapter.  They  all  belong,  indeed,  to  the  fuller  elucidation  of 
the  one  problem  of  epistemology ;  and  any  light  which  is 
thrown  upon  them  will  be  reflected  in  such  a  way  as  to  make 
yet  clearer  the  intrinsic  nature  of  human  cognition  and  the 
extent  and  surety  of  the  fundamental  grounds  on  which  the 
structure  of  human  cognition  stands.  For  this  reason  a  cer- 
tain scrappy  and  heterogeneous  character  may  be  pardoned  in 
the  appearance  of  the  following  thoughts. 

Even  to  speak  of  Degrees  of  Knowledge  will  appear  in  the 
eyes  of  many,  at  least  at  first  sight,  to  imply  a  misleading 
distinction  or  almost  a  misdemeanor.  For,  as  is  popularly 
said,  if  a  thing  is  so,  it  is  so ;  and  if  you  "  know  "  it  to  be 
so,  then  you  do  know,  and  not  merely  think,  or  believe,  it 
to  be  so.  It  might  possibly  be  added  by  the  reader  of  the 
previous  chapters,  —  either  with  a  mixture  of  fear  that  the 
work  of  validating  knowledge  which  has  thus  far  been  done 
is  about  to  be  overthrown,  or  with  the  agreeable  feeling  of 
the  confirmed  sceptic  when  he  finds  a  champion  of  rational 
faith  about  to  contradict  himself :  "  How  can  there  be  degrees 
of  knowledge,  if  it  is  the  very  nature  of  knowledge  to  have 
the  surety  which  has  been  ascribed  to  it  ?  " 


DEGREES,  LIMITS,  AND  KINDS,  OF  KNOWLEDGE    229 

In  attempting  the  question  whether  "degrees"  in  human 
knowledge  are  to  be  admitted,  it  is,  of  course,  first  of  all 
necessary  to  determine  in  what  senses  it  is  proposed  to 
understand  the  words  employed.  Not,  by  any  means,  that 
this  inquiry  is  a  merely  verbal  inquiry ;  but  it  is  an  ob- 
vious fact  that  to  speak  of  degrees  always  implies  some 
standard  of  measurement.  The  proposal,  therefore,  to  dis- 
cuss the  degrees  of  knowledge  implies  the  application  of  some 
kind  of  a  common  standard  to  the  different  classes  of  cogni- 
tive experiences.  We  are,  then,  in  search  of  a  thermometer 
which  will  mark,  however  roughly,  the  rise  and  fall  of  the 
feeling  of  conviction ;  or  of  a  rod  and  chain  which  will 
determine  the  magnitude  of  the  convicting  considerations ; 
or  of  a  theodolite  which  will  help  discern  the  remoter  fixed 
points  by  which  it  is  proposed  finally  to  orientate  ourselves  ; 
or,  finally,  perhaps,  of  a  graded  perimeter  of  magnificent 
proportions  which  will  enable  the  wise  critic  to  measure 
exactly  the  arc  covered  by  any  given  cognitive  judgment 
upon  the  total  sphere  of  human  science. 

If  now  the  thoughts  of  men,  as  expressed  both  in  their 
language  and  in  their  conduct,  be  carefully  regarded,  it  ap- 
pears that  there  are  two  widely  different  meanings  which 
they  consider  themselves  justified  in  employing,  when  speak- 
ing of  degrees  of  human  cognition.  One  meaning  has  regard 
to  the  strength  of  the  conviction,  as  reposing  on  clearly  recog- 
nized grounds,  with  which  any  cognitive  judgment  is  affirmed. 
Here  the  standard  of  measurement  is  graded  by  the  approach 
made  toward  an  ideal  which  is  talked  about  —  albeit  vaguely 
and  often  most  ignorantly  —  as  "  absolute."  But  if  we  in- 
quire more  particularly  into  the  interior  structure  of  this 
ideal  of  absolute  knowledge,  we  are  led  into  considerations 
of  the  most  unexpected  and  portentous  character.  For  the 
word  "  absolute  "  is  always  a  signal  which  sounds  the  call  to 
a  long  chase  and  a  tedious  hunt,  if  indeed  any  game  at  all 
reward  us  by  the  close  of  the  day.  "We  shall,  however,  soon 


230    DEGREES,  LIMITS,  AND  KINDS,  OF  KNOWLEDGE 

indicate  the  direction  in  which  such  tracks  are  sure  to  allure 
our  quest,  and  also  something  as  to  the  value  of  that  which 
may  be  gained  by  its  successful  termination. 

The  other  meaning  in  which  the  ascription  of  degrees  is 
applied  to  human  cognition  signifies  a  quite  different  stand- 
ard of  measurement.  According  to  this  second  standard, 
different  cognitive  acts  are  arranged  along  a  scale  of  higher 
and  lower  gradations  ;  this  arrangement,  of  course,  implies 
some  means  of  vertical  rather  than  horizontal  measurement, 
as  it  were.  Thus  what  is  called  "  scientific  knowledge  "  may 
be  affirmed  to  be  higher  than  ordinary  knowledge ;  and,  per- 
haps, philosophical  knowledge  gets  credit  for  the  merit  of 
having  several  degrees  of  still  greater  elevation  along  this 
graded  standard.  On  points  of  this  sort,  however,  one  must 
always  expect  a  wide  divergence  of  opinion.  Claims  are 
thrust  in.  upon  us  from  this  side  and  from  that,  varying  in 
their  cogency  as  they  are  presented  by  different  claimants 
and  under  the  differing  circumstances  of  the  history  of  human 
development.  For  example,  by  one  person,  at  all  times  in  his 
estimate,  or  by  the  majority  of  persons  at  certain  times  in  the 
life  of  the  race,  religious  and  artistic  knowledge  (if  the  word 
"  knowledge "  is  allowed  at  all  with  reference  to  religion 
and  art)  will  be  declared  "  higher "  than  any  other  sort  of 
knowledge  ;  but  by  other  persons  and  at  other  times,  scien- 
tific or  practical  knowledge  will  be  raised  to  the  place  of 
superior  altitude  along  the  scale.  We  are  not  interested 
just  now  to  inquire  whether  religious  and  artistic  knowledge 
can,  or  can  not,  be  rendered  scientific ;  or  in  what  sense,  if 
any,  it  is  to  be  distinguished  from  practical  knowledge.  But 
certainly,  this  wide-spread  habit  of  rating  cognitions  by 
bringing  them  up,  or  putting  them  down,  along  an  ideal 
scale  of  values  is  a  most  impressive  phenomenon.  Men,  in 
general,  either  boast  themselves  over  their  fellows  because  of 
the  claim  to  possess  some  more  desirable  and  valuable  sort 
of  knowledge;  or  else  they  lament  their  own  constitutional 


DEGREES,  LIMITS,  AND  KINDS,  OF  KNOWLEDGE    231 

and  educational  restrictions  which  they  regard  as  debarring 
or  hindering  them  from  certain  higher  forms  of  knowledge. 
The  late  Mr.  Romanes,  for  example,  at  one  time  in  his  brief 
but  interesting  life,  appeared  to  himself  to  have  lost  both 
knowledge  and  faith  of  the  theistic  order,  out  of  his  assured 
experiences.  Yet  he  always  professed  sincerely  his  regret 
over  an  inability  to  retain,  or  to  win  back,  something  of 
knowledge  that  possessed  such  a  high  degree  of  intrinsic 
value.  This  inability  he  ascribed  to  an  indisposition,  not 
wholly  devoid  of  will,  to  leave  the  beaten  tracks  of  the 
scientific  intellect  for  certain  cognitions,  or  beliefs,  attractive 
to  his  feelings.  Apparently,  at  the  last,  he  thought  of  himself 
as  having  regained  a  kind  of  rational  hold  on  religion's  great 
postulate,  under  the  impulse  and  guidance  of  feeling,  by  an 
act  of  voluntary  seizure, — in  such  way,  however,  as  not  to 
violate  his  continued  confidence  in  the  fundamental  principle 
of  all  science,  the  objective  validity  of  the  law  of  causation. 
Such  an  experience  is  popularly  called  "  faith "  rather  than 
knowledge.  So,  too,  do  we  find  a  certain  class  of  books  — 
in  our  opinion  suggestive  and  practically  helpful  to  many 
minds,  rather  than  profound  and  trustworthy  for  continued  and 
progressive  reflection  —  like  Mr.  Kidd's  "Social  Evolution," 
and  Mr.  Balfour's  "  The  Foundations  of  Belief,"  virtually 
recommending  the  supremacy  of  intellect  in  the  cognition 
of  certain  kinds  of  truth,  and  the  supremacy  of  feeling  in 
the  faith  of  certain  other  kinds  of  truth.  Yet  the  latter 
truths  as  judged  by  eesthetical  and  practical  standards,  are, 
conceded  to  be  of  the  higher  order.  In  all  such  cases  the 
assumption  seems  common  that,  so  far  as  the  defensible 
grounds  in  reality,  and  the  logical  processes  connecting  con- 
clusions with  these  grounds  are  concerned.  "  science"  in  the 
narrower  meaning  of  the  word,  is  alone  worthy  to  be  called 
cognition. 

How  much  of  truth  there  is  in  the  above-mentioned  as- 
sumption, we  shall  discuss  later  on.     The  thing  now  to  be 


232    DEGREES,  LIMITS,  AND  KINDS,  OF  KNOWLEDGE 

noticed  concerns  the  import  of  any  such  discussion.  Cer- 
tainly the  discussion  itself  implies  some  ideal  standard  of  a 
quite  different  kind  from  that  which  defines  the  degrees  of 
knowledge  when  these  degrees  are  measured  as  differing  in 
surety  based  on  recognized  grounds.  This  inquiry  assumes 
the  value  of  truth  in  its  relation  to  life  as  constituting  also 
a  fitting  standard  of  measurement.  Is  a  man's  ideal  of 
value  the  exact  correspondence  of  his  mental  representations 
to  the  carefully  formulated  connections  of  objective  phe- 
nomena ?  Then  scientific  truth  is  the  highest  kind  of  truth. 
To  such  an  extent  may  this  be  carried  that  the  microscope, 
telescope,  crucible,  and  mathematics,  may  finally  seem  to 
such  a  man  the  only  means  of  arriving  at  a  high  degree  of 
real  knowledge.  But  if  one's  ideal  is  rather  that  afforded  by 
a  vivid  feeling  of  the  worth  of  self-conscious  life  in  general, 
and  by  the  mental  and  practical  grasp  upon  the  principles  of 
conduct,  it  is  evident  that  another  kind  of  cognition,  if  attain- 
able at  all,  will  be  ranked  higher  in  degree  than  so-called 
scientific  cognition.  But  the  one  truth  implied  by  both  stand- 
ards, and  by  all  contest  over  the  supremacy  of  any  sort  of 
knowledge,  is  a  certain  doctrine  of  the  teleology  of  knowledge. 
This  doctrine  too,  has  its  roots  in  psychology,  which  shows 
us  that  every  kind  and  degree  of  cognition  involves  all  the 
so-called  faculties  of  mind  in  a  living  unity  of  action.  The 
epistemological  conclusion  follows,  not  as  an  abstract  theory, 
but  as  a  recognition  of  the  universal  import  of  the  language 
and  conduct  of  men.  Cognition  cannot  be  considered  apart 
from  life.  Whatever  kind  of  value  knowledge  has,  and  what- 
ever degree  is  attainable  in  any  particular  kind  of  value, 
knowledge  is  also  always  means  to  an  end  that  lies  above  itself, 
Whether  one  says  credo  ut  intelligam  or  intelligo  ut  credam, 
and  whether  one  rates  the  satisfactions  of  faith  or  the  satis- 
factions of  intellect  most  highly,  the  true  state  of  the  case 
remains  the  same.  All  men  set  up  in  speech  and  in  conduct 
some  ideal  of  a  life  that  has  worth  ;  and  they  rate  their  own 


DEGREES,  LIMITS,  AND  KINDS,  OF  KNOWLEDGE    233 

attainments,  and  the  attainments  of  others,  in  the  matter  of 
cognition,  according  to  their  ideal  of  the  life  that  has  supreme 
worth.  It  appears,  then,  even  at  this  stage  in  our  inquiry 
that  the  import  of  cognition  is  necessarily  teleological,  and 
that  aesthetical  and  ethical  "  momenta "  cannot  possibly  be 
excluded  from  the  theory  of  knowledge.  To  these  important 
and  fruitful  thoughts  we  shall  return  again  and  again.  For 
not  only  are  they  portions  of  every  well-considered  philoso- 
phy of  knowledge,  but  they  also  serve  to  connect  a  theory 
of  knowledge  with  the  philosophy  of  conduct,  the  philosophy 
of  art,  and  the  philosophy  of  religion. 

Men  commonly  distinguish,  and  often  very  sharply,  between 
opining,  believing,  thinking,  and  mere  dreaming,  on  the  one 
hand,  and  knowledge,  on  the  other  hand.  The  character- 
istics which  mark  this  distinction  are  of  two  kinds ;  yet 
these  two  kinds  are  so  related  in  the  individual  processes  of 
cognition,  as  well  as  in  the  growth  of  cognition,  that  they 
are  mutually  dependent  and  mutually  serviceable.  They 
are,  first,  the  intensity  and  tenacity  of  the  conviction  which 
belongs  to  the  judgment  terminating  the  mental  process ; 
and,  second,  the  clearness  and  completeness  of  the  conscious 
recognition  given  to  the  grounds  upon  which  this  judgment 
bases  itself.  Because  both  these  characteristics  can  be  tested, 
or  realized,  in  the  consciousness  of  the  cognizing  subject,  all 
men  make,  more  or  less  intelligently,  a  distinction  between 
knowledge  and  other  allied  mental  states.  Yet  consider 
what  strange  confusion  of  language  and  practice  prevails  in 
this  entire  matter !  Many  men  affirm  knowledge  for  them- 
selves on  grounds  which  would  avail  with  difficulty  to  warrant 
other  men  in  pronouncing  even  a  doubtful  opinion  ;  and  the 
affirmation  is  "  backed  up "  with  a  warmth  and  tenacity  of 
conviction  whicli  others  reserve  for  only  the  most  certain  and 
important  of  universally  accepted  practical  truths.  In  some 
minds  this  way  of  mental  seizure  upon  the  "  stuff  "  of  opinion, 
with  a  view  at  once  to  convert  it  into  the  finished  product 


234    DEGREES,  LIMITS,  AND  KINDS,  OF  KNOWLEDGE 

of  cognition,  appears  habitual  or  even  constitutional.  But 
other  minds,  especially  those  that  possess  the  so-called  scien- 
tific bent  and  method  and  habit,  scarcely  venture  to  affirm 
knowledge  of  any  kind  ;  and  would  willingly  give  to  all  the 
accepted  categorical  judgments  in  which  the  matter-of-fact 
basis  of  science  consists,  the  pale  and  sickly  cast  of  mere 
opinion.  Is  it  time  to  forget  how  Dr.  Bastian  affirmed  that, 
"for  a  fact,"  he  saw  living  forms  spontaneously  generated 
in  thoroughly  sterilized  fluid;  and  how  Mr.  Romanes  wrote 
to  Darwin  his  intention  to  "  believe  "  in  pangenesis,  whether 
he  could  establish  it  by  proof  or  not  ? 

It  is  generally  admitted  that  "  opinion "  is  a  word  to  be 
used  for  those  of  our  judgments  which  cannot  be  so  clearly 
connected  with  grounds  as  to  render  them  entitled  to  the  term 
"  cognitive  "  ;  and  also  that  such  judgments  do  not  warrant, 
and  cannot  rationally  receive,  the  same  degree  of  conviction 
as  that  which  attaches  itself  to  genuine  cognitive  judgments. 
By  "  belief "  we  oftenest  intend  to  mark  those  mental  atti- 
tudes in  which  judgment  is  pronounced  under  the  influence 
of  feeling,  but  with  little  or  no  satisfactory  recognition  of  its 
justifying  grounds,  and  generally,  therefore,  with  a  weaker 
degree  of  conviction.  When  men  reason,  however,  and  affirm 
the  judgment  in  which  the  process  of  reasoning  terminates  as 
merely  their  "  thought  about,"  rather  than  their  "  knowledge 
of"  any  subject,  they  usually  mean  to  emphasize  a  distinc- 
tion somewhat  different  from  the  foregoing.  Thinking,  as  a 
mental  performance,  is  per  se  a  placing  of  the  judgment  on 
consciously  recognized  grounds ;  no  one  can,  therefore,  prop- 
erly say  that  he  thinks  thus  and  so  about  any  matter  of  judg- 
ment who  has  not  really  done  some  thinking — or  tracing 
out  of  the  grounds  of  his  judgment.  The  words  "  I  think," 
rather  than  the  words  "  I  know,"  may  be  employed,  how- 
ever, either  because  the  path  of  judgments,  across  which 
the  thinking  lies,  is  not  itself  wholly  clear ;  or  because 
the  path,  although  itself  clear,  does  not  lead  to  any  ground 


DEGREES,  LIMITS,  AND  KINDS,  OF  KNOWLEDGE    235 

of  the    kind   which   can   be   called    immediate   or   intuitive 
cognition. 

The  distinction  between  knowledge  and  dreaming  —  or  any 
form  of  that  merely  reproductive  or  more  constructive  associ- 
ation of  ideas  of  which  dreaming  is  the  popular  type  —  is  of  a 
still  different  character.  Doubtless,  if  the  question  as  to  the 
amount  of  cognition  possible  in  dream-life  is  seriously  raised, 
it  receives  from  experience  a  somewhat  doubtful  and  contra- 
dictory answer.  Most  intelligent  persons  are  accustomed  to 
regard  their  dreams  as  having,  at  best,  little  value  in  promoting 
a  growth  of  genuine  cognition ;  science,  at  any  rate,  does  not 
come  by  way  of  dreaming,  and  few,  if  any,  are  the  contribu- 
tions to  the  assured  body  of  scientific  truths  which  have  been 
made  by  the  most  florid  dreamers.  Other  persons,  on  the  con- 
trary, go  to  the  extreme  of  attaching  a  superior  significance 
to  the  impressions,  the  mental  pictures  of  present  or  approach- 
ing realities,  which  arise  in  the  mind  during  its  dream-life. 
It  is  not  our  present  intention  to  deny  the  existence  of  dreams 
of  anticipation,  revelation,  or  prophecy ;  or  to  dispute  the  ac- 
curacy of  the  alleged  facts  on  which  the  efficacy  of  this  means 
of  attaining  knowledge  is  affirmed.  Perhaps  Tartini  did 
actually  dream  out  his  "  Devil's  Sonata,"  and  Voltaire,  one 
version  of  his  song  to  Henriadne.  Dannecker's  colossal 
"  Christus "  may  have  first  appeared  to  him  as  a  dream- 
image  ;  and  Jean  Paul  may  be  reciting  correctly  facts  of 
experience  when  he  maintains  that  in  dreams  he  often  saw 
sights,  especially  countenances  and  eyes,  incomparable,  and 
which  remained  of  influence  with  him  for  a  long  time.  Such 
experiences,  however,  are  scarcely  to  be  called  cognition ;  or 
if  so-called  at  all,  such  cognition  is  certainly  of  a  low  degree 
both  of  surety  and  of  value.  Prognostications  of  a  definite 
sort  may  also  come  in  dreams ;  as  in  the  case  of  the  man  of 
whom  old  Galen  tells,  who  dreamed  his  leg  had  turned  to 
stone,  and  awoke  to  find  it  paralyzed.  Thus  Aristides  is  said 
to  have  dreamed  in  the  temple  of  yEsculapius  that  a  bull 


236     DEGREES,  LIMITS,  AND  KINDS,  OF  KNOWLEDGE 

wounded  him  in  the  knee,  at  the  spot  where  a  tumor  almost 
immediately  appeared.  Arnold  de  Villanova  felt  himself 
bitten  by  a  black  cat  in  the  foot,  where  the  next  day  a  can- 
cerous ulcer  appeared ;  and  Gessner  perished  of  a  malignant 
pustule  which  appeared  in  his  breast  a  few  days  after  he  had 
been  bitten,  in  a  dream,  by  a  poisonous  serpent.  As  to  the 
psycho-physical  explanation  of  such  artistic  and  premonitory 
psychoses,  the  modern  science  of  psychology  is  not  greatly  at 
a  loss.  They  only  emphasize  the  natural  and  acquired  talent 
at  construction  and  interpretation,  of  the  human  image-mak- 
ing faculty,  which  sometimes  hits  it  right  in  a  manner  ap- 
proaching the  surest  instincts  of  the  animals, —  but  then,  even 
oftener,  hits  it  wrong.  What  should  now  be  remembered, 
however,  is  that  these  forms  of  consciousness,  for  the  most 
part,  incontestably  lack  just  those  characteristics  that  distin- 
guish cognition  from  every  other  form  of  mental  life.  Hence 
the  wise  Sirach  declares :  "  Dreams  deceive  many  people, 
and  fail  those  who  build  on  them." 

In  this  connection  it  should  be  noticed  that  even  the  most 
vivid  sense-perceptions  in  dream-life,  as  a  rule,  lack  the 
characteristics  of  genuine  cognition  by  the  senses.  We  are 
not  sure  that  the  words  "  as  a  rule  "  might  not  be  converted 
into  "  universally,"  if  only  the  distinction  could  always  be 
accurately  drawn  between  the  coloring  which  the  act  of  wak- 
ing, recognitive  memory  imparts  to  the  dream  and  the  coloring 
which  it  actually  had,  as  a  dream,  at  the  time  of  its  occur- 
rence. Generally,  if  not  universally,  nothing  strictly  resem- 
bling cognition  by  the  senses  —  perceptive  knowledge  of 
things  —  takes  place  in  dreams.  But  then,  four  fifths  of 
what  is  called  perception  in  daily  waking  life  lacks  the  char- 
acteristics of  a  fully  established  cognition  of  things.  For 
example,  I  pass  rapidly  along  the  streets,  thinking  over  some 
topic  which  interests  me,  or  intent  upon  getting  somewhere 
in  the  pursuit  of  some  plan.  The  series  of  mental  images, 
objectly  determined,  to  be  sure,  yet  scarcely  noticed  and  not 


DEGREES,  LIMITS,  AND  KINDS,  OF  KNOWLEDGE    237 

criticised  or  judged  at  all,  cannot  be  said  to  amount  to  a  fully 
established  cognition  of  series  of  things.  If  I  afterward  ask 
myself,  What  have  I  seen  by  the  way  ?  the  question  is  a 
challenge  to  that  critical  and  judging  attitude  which  was 
lacking  to  the  original  series  of  mental  images  ;  and  the  re- 
sult may  be  the  establishment  now,  by  recognitive  memory,  of 
a  representative  cognition  of  things.  But  it  is  precisely  this 
characteristic  of  critical  judgment  which  is  ordinarily  lacking 
to  the  sensuous  impressions  of  dream-life ;  the  latter  may 
therefore  have  a  startling  vividness  and  intensity  without, 
for  that  reason,  furnishing  the  characteristics  of  objective 
cognition. 

Occasionally,  however,  the  critical  process  which  thinking 
brings  to  bear  upon  mental  images,  in  order  to  test,  as  it 
were,  their  fitness  to  become  terms  in  a  cognitive  judgment 
does  take  place  in  dreams.  Oftenest  this  occurs  while  one 
is  moving  along  the  border  line  between  waking  and  sleeping. 
Modern  experiments  have  shown  clearly  that  during  the  last 
three  quarters,  or  four  fifths  of  the  seven  or  eight  hours  of 
healthy  sleep,  the  curve  which  measures  the  depth  of  sleep 
runs  almost  parallel  with  the  line  of  waking.  The  stream  of 
consciousness  then  becomes  a  mixture  of  two  classes  of  ele- 
ments and  two  corresponding  sets  of  considerations.  Reality 
beats  its  way  in  fitfully  and  spasmodically  upon  the  fantastic 
domain  of  dreams  ;  it  colors  the  dreams  without  converting 
them  into  waking  cognitions,  or  it  gets  a  momentary  standing 
in  the  stream  of  consciousness,  from  which  to  push  back  into 
oblivion  the  dream-land  itself.  We,  the  conscious  subjects 
of  the  states  (fitfully  half  self-conscious  and  half  conscious 
of  a  reality  not-ourseives),  are  still,  for  the  most  part,  sub- 
jected to  the  reproductive  and  low-thoughted  creative  activity 
of  the  image-making  faculty.  This  activity  weaves  before  us 
beautiful  and  wonderful  fabrics,  and  again  patterns  of  most 
absurd  and  monstrous  shapes.  But  it  does  not  tell  us  what  is 
true.  And  until  we  can  "  come  to  our  self,"  can  so  get  our 


238    DEGREES,  LIMITS,  AND  KINDS,  OF  KNOWLEDGE 

bearings  as  to  criticise  what  we  see,  and  to  think  whether  it 
will  fit  in  to  the  entire  structure  of  knowledge,  we  cannot  tell 
whether  we  are  sleeping  or  waking  ;  whether  what  we  behold 
as  not-me  is  some  real  thing  or  is  the  pure  product  of  our 
creative  phantasy.  Now,  lo !  we  are  wide  awake,  and  all  is 
changed.  We  have  entered  again  into  that  form  of  soul-life 
in  which  knowledge  asserts  its  own  characteristic  differentia- 
tion from  mere  opining,  mere  believing,  mere  having  of  sen- 
suous impressions,  or  thoughts,  or  associated  mental  images. 
We  come  down  hard  now  upon  our  cognitive  judgments, 
stand  ready  to  defend  them  as  resting  upon  grounds  which 
can  be  given  to  the  recognition  of  other  men,  and  exercise  a 
sturdy,  common-sense  confidence  in  their  validity  for  the 
beings  and  relations  of  the  really  existent  world.  Armed 
thus,  we  turn  with  cheerful  and  courageous  spirit  to  smile  at 
our  dreams  and  to  face  the  actual  beings  and  transactions  of 
the  daily  life. 

But  while  the  distinction  between  cognition  and  other 
allied  forms  of  experience  has  reference  to  an  absolute  stan- 
dard, the  distinction  itself  is  not  absolute.  The  rather  is  it 
relative  —  to  the  standard.  All  men  have  some  sort  of  an 
ideal  of  knowledge,  which  is  indisputable  as  to  the  strength 
and  tenacity  of  the  conviction  accompanying  its  grasp  upon 
reality,  and  indubitable  in  the  full  aspect  of  the  reasons 
which  justify,  by  making  rational,  the  attitude  of  feeling  and 
will  toward  its  truth.  To  attain  such  knowledge  is  to  be 
wholly  satisfied  in  one's  own  being  by  the  character  of  the 
commerce  thus  obtained  with  other  being  than  one's  own. 
In  the  experience  of  such  acts  of  cognition,  one  cannot  rea- 
sonably doubt,  and  one  does  not  feel  willing  to  doubt.  Looked 
upon  from  the  side  of  intellection,  the  evidence  for  the  truth 
of  the  cognitive  judgment  is  complete  ;  looked  upon  from  the 
side  of  affective  disposition,  belief  is  cordial,  harmonizing, 
satisfactory ;  looked  upon  from  the  side  of  volition,  the  affir- 
mation or  negation  is  an  act  that  is  devoid  of  wavering,  and 


DEGREES,  LIMITS,  AND  KINDS,  OF  KNOWLEDGE    239 

that  appears  as  a  grasping  of  the  real  being  of  the  object 
by  the  inmost  being  of  the  subject.  Such  an  attitude  of  the 
whole  soul  toward  Reality  is  called  absolute  knowledge  — 
so  far  as  the  term  "  absolute "  can  be  applied  to  human 
cognition,  regarded  even  as  an  ideal. 

Now,  however,  it  appears  that  different  degrees  of  approach 
to  this  ideal  of  an  absolute  cognition  are  classed  together,  or 
apart,  according  to  a  variety  of  changing  conditions.  As  to 
evidence,  the  kind  and  amount  required  to  warrant  knowl- 
edge, in  distinction  from  opinion  or  belief,  varies  greatly,  not 
only  in  dependence  upon  the  characteristics  of  the  cognizing 
subject,  but  also  in  respect  of  the  character  of  the  object  of 
knowledge,  the  kind  of  knowledge,  the  amount  of  evidence 
obtainable,  etc.  The  vague  term  "  sufficient  reason  "  affords 
no  help  here.  The  rather  is  it  one  of  several  terms  due  to 
Leibnitz  and  his  followers,  which  has  continued  to  seduce 
certain  minds,  peculiarly  liable  to  errors  of  formalism,  into 
supposing  that  logical  formulas  can  afford  satisfactory  tests 
of  real  knowledge.  But  no  definition,  not  to  say  description, 
can  ever  be  given  as  to  precisely  how  much,  or  as  to  what 
kind  of  evidence  is  sufficient.  Suppose,  for  instance,  that 
an  appeal  be  taken  to  the  evidence  of  the  senses,  with  the 
opinion  that  upon  it  alone,  when  clear  and  indubitable,  the 
rational  confidence  of  an  absolute  cognition  can  be  reposed. 
And  now  we  have  to  deal,  on  the  one  hand,  with  the  man 
who  "  thrusts  his  fists  against  the  posts,  and  still  insists  he 
sees  the  ghosts,"  and  on  the  other  hand,  with  the  German  phi- 
losopher who  declares  that  "  he  will  not  believe  a  miracle  even 
if  he  sees  one  with  his  own  eyes."  In  such  cases  as  these 
there  can  be  no  doubt  as  to  the  relativity  of  knowledge,  in 
the  form  of  dependence  upon  the  total  bent  and  entire  past 
experience  of  the  cognizing  subject,  as  well  as  upon  the  vary- 
ing characteristics  of  the  object  of  cognition. 

Account  must  also  be  taken  of  the  reciprocal  influence  of 
the  different  principal  factors  of  an  act  looking  toward  cogni- 


240     DEGREES,  LIMITS,  AND  KINDS,  OF  KNOWLEDGE 

tion,  in  determining  whether  it  shall  be  accepted  as  a  valid 
cognition,  or  only  be  allowed  the  rank  of  an  opinion,  a  belief, 
a  thought,  or  a  product  of  imagination.  Here  one's  experi- 
ence is  that  of  trying  to  bring  about  an  adjustment  of  all 
these  factors  so  as  to  render  the  mind  in  harmony  with  itself, 
and,  so  to  speak,  in  agreement  with  the  really  existent  that 
lies  "beyond"  the  mind.  If  we  find  evidence  in  perception, 
or  in  thought,  that  the  fact  is  so,  the  principle  true,  or  that 
the  event  will  happen,  then  we  feel  a  corresponding  increase  of 
conviction,  and  firmness  of  will  in  laying  down  the  cognitive 
judgment,  "  It  is  so  "  ;  or, "  It  is  true  "  ;  or, "  It  will  happen." 
But  if  the  right  kind  of  affective  and  voluntary  attitude  does 
not  develop  in  correspondence  with  a  clarifying  recognition 
of  the  evidence,  then  the  mind  fails  of  knowledge  in  its  own 
estimate ;  it  feels  "  in  reason  bound  "  to  remain  in  the  state 
of  mere  opinion  or  mere  belief.  In  many  cases,  however, — 
and,  especially,  in  cases  of  so-called  practical  or  religious 
truth,  —  feeling,  with  its  motive  effects  in  the  voluntary  attitude 
or  tendency,  takes  the  lead  of  intellection.  We  think,  we 
believe,  we  are  of  the  cherished  opinion,  that  it  is  so,  and  yet 
we  refrain  from  saying,  "  I  know  "  ;  this  is  because  we  cannot 
bring  into  consciousness  the  grounds  on  which  to  justify 
before  our  intellects  a  complete  cognitive  judgment. 

What  in  doubtful  and  conflicting  cases  will  the  truly  ra- 
tional, the  genuinely  wise  man  do  ?  Will  he  disregard  wholly 
the  impulse  of  feeling  and  the  resulting  tendency  of  will  to 
accept  the  desirable  proposition,  the  longed-for  "  It-is-so  "  ? 
By  no  means.  Were  this  resolve  firmly  made  by  every  human 
being,  it  could  not  be  carried  into  effect.  Men  will  look  about 
for  evidence  to  prove  what  they  desire  to  know  as  true  ;  and 
they  will  know  to  be  true  that  which  it  pleases  them  to  have 
true,  on  less  evidence  than  they  require  in  proof  of  what  the 
affective,  the  practical,  the  sesthetical  side  of  human  nature 
reacts  against.  To  say  this  at  all  is  simply  to  say  that  the 
soul  of  man  is  not  a  mere  intellectual  mechanism,  and  that 


DEGREES,  LIMITS,  AND  KINDS,  OF  KNOWLEDGE    241 

it  never  reaches  cognition  simply  by  following  the  process  of 
ratiocination.  It  is  to  affirm  again  a  true  theory  of  kriowl- 
ed«-e,  and  to  take  another  step  toward  putting  this  theory 
in  defensible  relations  to  the  totality  of  human  life.  Nor 
would  it  accrue  to  the  benefit  of  the  kingdom  of  knowl- 
edge, if  its  subjects  were  to  serve  with  less  of  warm  interest 
and  hearty  resolve  as  to  the  reward  of  service  they  are  them- 
selves to  receive.  For  in  the  conquests  which  this  kingdom 
has  made,  human  feeling  and  human  will,  enlisted  in  the 
effort  to  procure  room  for  settlement  upon  firm  ground  of 
rationality,  have,  as  a  rule,  taken  the  part  of  leaders  and 
guides.  They  are  oftenest  the  scouts,  the  sappers  and  miners, 
the  trumpeters  which  sound  the  charge,  or  the  call  from  sure 
defeat  and  final  discouragement,  of  the  army  which  extends 
this  kingdom.  This  epistemological  truth  is  not  confined  to 
matters  of  conduct  and  religion  alone.  It  is  equally  true  in 
matters  of  science  and  philosophy.  We  shall  subsequently 
show  that  considerations  largely  of  an  affective  and  quasi- 
practical  character  not  only  stimulate  the  discoveries  of 
science,  but  also  enter  largely  into  the  very  body  of  scientific 
knowledge.  It  is  enough  here  to  notice  that  the  great  leaders 
in  the  physical  and  natural  sciences  have  oftenest  felt  and 
willed  their  way  to  the  first  approaches  of  truth,  and  have 
then,  so  to  speak,  backed  themselves  up  by  searching  out 
proofs  to  justify  them  before  others. 

It  must  not  for  a  moment  be  supposed,  however,  that  igno- 
rant and  blind  feeling,  whatever  degree  of  warmth  it  may 
attain,  can  raise  a  belief,  or  an  opinion,  to  the  grade  of  an 
assured  cognition.  One  would  not  wisely  consult  the  colored 
"  aunty,"  who  "  feels  in  her  bones  "  that  every  word  of  the 
Pentateuch  came  by  divine  dictation,  in  order  to  refute  the 
theories  of  Kuenen  and  Wellhausen.  But  even  her  feelings 
may  have  no  small  value  in  connection  with  some  sort  of 
belief,  that  is  capable  of  being  raised,  by  proof,  to  the  rank 
of  a  cognitive  judgment.  For  knowledge  and  faith  are  not 

16 


242    DEGREES,  LIMITS,  AND  KINDS,  OF  KNOWLEDGE 

really  distinguished  after  the  critical  fashion  which  Kant 
made  so  disastrous  to  the  integrity  of  both.  Nor  is  the  dis- 
tinction itself,  fundamentally  considered  and  as  affecting  our 
epistemological  theory,  one  that  has  reference  to  different 
classes  of  objects. 

It  appears,  then,  that  degrees  of  knowledge  must  be  recog- 
nized, not  only  in  explanation  of  the  subjective  changes  which 
mark  the  approach  to  an  ideal  standard,  but  also  as  belonging 
to  the  very  nature  of  all  knowledge  considered  as  a  growth 
of  experience  objectively  determined.  This  undoubtedly  re- 
quires, in  some  sort,  a  doctrine  of  the  "  relativity "  of  all 
knowledge.  But  it  certainly  would  not  be  justifiable,  at  this 
point  in  our  critical  examination,  to  make  one  grand  leap 
over  into  the  domain  of  dogmatic  scepticism  or  critical 
agnosticism.  Even  if  no  such  prize  as  absolute  knowledge 
were  attainable  by  man,  the  other  part  of  the  alternative 
would  not,  as  a  matter  of  course,  force  the  conclusion  that  no 
real  knowledge  is  attainable.  For  plainly  the  principle  of 
continuity  must  be  used  here  in  the  same  sensible  way  in 
which  it  is  used  in  other  similar  subjects  of  inquiry.  For 
example,  an  elm-tree  is  a  plant  and  not  an  animal ;  but  an 
elephant  is  an  animal  and  not  a  plant.  Thus  much  may  be 
known  and  affirmed  without  hesitation.  But  the  elm-tree  and 
the  elephant  are,  in  several  important  respects,  alike ;  and 
there  are  some  beings  possessing  the  most  important  of 
these  respects,  common  to  elm-tree  and  to  elephant,  about 
which  biology  is  in  doubt  as  to  whether  they  are  plants  or 
animals.  Between  these  beings  of  a  doubtful  class  and 
both  elm-tree  and  elephant,  a  continuous  series  of  living 
forms  can  be  interposed.  In  other  words,  one  is  not  forced 
to  deny  the  important  distinctions  between  certain  atti- 
tudes of  mind  that  are  plainly  cognitions,  with  all  which 
this  implies,  and  certain  other  attitudes  that  plainly  fall 
short  of  being  cognitions,  because  one  can  give  no  universal 
rule  for  distinguishing  cognitions,  or  because  one  finds  one's 


DEGREES,  LIMITS,  AND  KINDS,  OF  KNOWLEDGE    243 

actual  cognitions  capable  of  being  arranged  in  varying  de- 
grees of  approach  to  a  standard  which  measures  them  all. 

The  illustration  just  given,  however,  is  not  intended  to  apply 
throughout.  For  the  most  important  question  of  all  still  re- 
quires a  brief  answer.  Is  there  any  experience  possible  for 
man  which  actually  answers  to  his  own  ideal  of  "  absolute 
knowledge "  ?  To  this  question  one  may  answer  unhesitat- 
ingly, Yes.  The  completed  act  of  self-consciousness,  ending 
in  the  judgment  which  affirms  my  own  here-and-now  being, 
for  myself,  is  such  an  absolute  cognition.  As  involving  in- 
tellect, feeling,  will,  all  in  harmony  and,  when  harmoniously 
employed,  reaching  an  envisagement  of  reality  that  has  noth- 
ing more  profound,  or  more  complete,  or  more  worthy  (except 
the  extension  of  essentially  the  same  cognitive  process  over 
wider  and  wider  areas),  this  immediate  knowledge  of  the  Self 
by  itself  z's,  in  actuality,  the  realized  ideal  of  knowledge.  In 
grading  other  degrees  of  cognition  we  employ  this  ideal  as 
our  standard.  After  this  pattern  alone  can  we  conceive  of 
the  Divine  Mind  as  a  fountain  of  absolute  knowledge. 

As  a  matter  of  experience,  the  possibility  is  afforded,  and 
the  actuality  proved,  of  a  certain  form  of  absolute  knowledge 
by  sense-perception  also.  That  my  object  is  there,  thus  and 
so  determined  for  me,  and  by  me,  and  yet  as  not-me, —  this, 
too,  is  a  cognitive  judgment  which  has  all  the  characteristics 
belonging  to  the  ideal  of  absolute  knowledge.  But  how  far, 
at  this  point  and  henceforward,  the  knowledge  of  Things  falls 
off  from  and  drops  behind  the  knowledge  of  Self,  has  been 
discussed  at  length  in  the  last  chapter. 

In  respect  of  the  essential  characteristics  of  knowledge, 
all  other  forms  of  cognition  have  only  a  relative  degree,— 
such  as  marks  their  nearness  of  approach  toward  an  ideal  and 
absolute  standard.  This  is  true  even  of  the  knowledge  of 
our  own  past  selves.  It  is  knowledge  which,  at  its  best,  is 
guaranteed  by  the  act  of  recognitive  memory,  and  thought 
into  consistency  with  all  the  other  experiences  that  seem  to 


have  a  bearing  on  the  truth  of  the  cognitive  judgment.  At  its 
poorest,  what  appears  knowledge  of  the  past  is  mere  unjusti- 
fiable belief  or  untrustworthy  opinion.  Back  to  these  firm 
points  of  standing  in  our  so-called  immediate  or  intuitive 
knowledge  of  Self  and  of  Things  we  keep  referring  all  our 
opinions,  beliefs,  and  thoughts,  in  order  to  make  between  the 
latter  and  the  former  that  rational  connection  which  is  called 
"  proof."  The  principles  that  underlie  this  process  of  "mak- 
ing rational  connection"  await  detailed  examination.  The 
picture  gained  as  the  result  of  exploring  the  realm  of  knowl- 
edge, to  discover  in  what  respect  it  admits  of  degrees,  is  the 
picture  of  a  changing  and  developing  life  of  the  mind.  This 
is  true  both  for  the  individual  and  for  the  race.  Human 
beliefs  are  constantly  growing  stronger  or  fading  away ;  they 
are  gathering  to  themselves,  or  losing  from  themselves,  the 
light  of  intellect  needed  to  convert  them  into  cognitions,  to 
fit  them  to  become  part  of  the  body  of  human  knowledge. 
Thoughts  are  getting  more  or  less  abstract,  are  flying  lower 
or  flying  higher  — 

"In  regions  mild  of  calm  and  serene  air, 
Above  the  smoke  and  strife  of  this  dim  spot, 
Which  men  call  Earth." 

But  the  lowest  of  human  thoughts  must  make  connection 
with  the  highest,  or  sink  into  the  mire ;  and  the  highest  of 
human  thoughts  can  soar  toward  heaven  only  if  they  return 
frequently  to  rest  upon  the  solid  grounds  of  some  kind  of 
fact.  Imaginations  constantly  run  far  ahead  of  known 
truths;  but  they  vanish  in  the  mist  unless  they  prove  the 
forerunners  of  truths  to  be  known,  bearing  beneath  them  the 
sustaining  limbs  of  experience  and  carrying  on  their  backs 
a  good  load  of  the  choicest  ethical  and  aesthetical  interests 
of  mankind.  Is  this,  however,  a  picture  to  make  a  brave 
and  thoughtful  man  sit  down  in  the  dust  of  scepticism,  or 
stick  fast  in  the  quagmire  of  a  hopeless  agnosticism?  We 
are  "  of  opinion,"  that  it  is  not. 


DEGREES,  LIMITS,  AND  KINDS,  OF  KNOWLEDGE    245 

The  use  of  the  term"  degrees  of  knowledge,"  with  reference 
.to  some  ideal  standard  of  worth  which  enables  us  to  rate 
different  cognitions  as  "  higher "  or  "  lower "  than  one 
another,  needs  little  further  exposition  at  this  point.  It  is 
plain  that  the  standard  set  up  is  not,  in  this  case,  the  excel- 
lence of  the  approach  made  by  any  particular  cognition,  or 
set  of  cognitions,  to  some  ideal  which  is  itself  of  a  cognitive 
character.  The  amount  and  kind  of  evidence,  the  strength 
and  tenacity  of  conviction,  the  motif  and  firmness  of  will 
in  affirming  or  rejecting,  are  all  integral  parts  of  the  cogni- 
tive process  itself.  But  the  claim  of  different  cognitive 
judgments  —  for  example,  those  of  the  man  of  ordinary  ex- 
perience, of  the  scientific  man,  and  of  the  philosopher,  or 
those  of  the  advocates  of  the  supreme  importance  of  conduct, 
or  of  religion,  or  of  "  truth  for  its  own  sake  "  —  to  stand 
above  each  other  in  excellence,  must  be  taken  to  some  court 
of  appeal  that  does  riot  have  regard  merely  to  the  quality  of 
the  cognition  as  such.  We  have  already  declared  that  the 
appeal  is  made  in  this  case  to  the  value  of  some  kind  of  ideal 
life.  This  fact  may  suffice  to  indicate  the  unreasonableness 
of  the  alternative  proclaimed  by  many  writers  1  between  per- 
fectly clear,  indubitable,  and  certain  knowledge  and  no  knowl- 
edge at  all.  Such  an  alternative  overlooks  the  very  nature 
of  knowledge  and  the  unavoidable  conditions  of  its  growth  ; 
to  carry  it  out  would  oblige  us  to  confine  the  word  to  the 
immediate  deliverances  of  self-consciousness  and  sense-per- 
ception. Science  would  then  not  be  knowledge.  And,  in- 
deed, all  knowledge  would  be  impossible ;  for  this  perfectly 
clear,  indubitable,  and  certain  knowledge  is  itself  a  matter 
of  growth,  a  prize  to  stimulate  achievement  rather  than  a 
ready-made  and  completed  gift  from  the  hand  of  Reality. 

Probably  no  other  branch  of  epistemology  has  led  to  so 
much  misconception  as  the  inquiry  into  the  Limits  of  Knowl- 

1  For  example,  by  Mr.  Bradley  in  his  "  Appearance  and  Reality,"  chapter  on 
"  Degrees  of  Knowledge." 


246    DEGREES,  LIMITS,  AND  KINDS,  OF  KNOWLEDGE 

edge.  And  not  a  little  theoretical  confusion,  as  well  as  no 
small  store  of  mischief  in  the  practical  life,  has  resulted 
from  this  misconception.  Yet  almost  all  that  can  be  said 
respecting  limits  to  human  cognition,  so  far  as  the  doctrine 
of  limits  forms  a  legitimate  part  of  epistemology,  lies  near 
the  surface  and  may  be  speedily  brought  to  view.  Strictly 
speaking,  to  describe  the  limits  of  human  cognition  in  general 
would  require  that  one  should  mark  out  the  entire  domain 
of  all  the  particular  sciences,  with  the  accompanying  degrees 
of  evidence  of  various  kinds  which  these  sciences  possess 
and  to  which  they  defer.  Such  "  geographizing,"  however, 
would  add  little  or  nothing  to  a  philosophical  theory  of 
knowledge.  It  would  bear  about  the  same  relation  to  our 
higher  theoretical  interests  which  the  nautical  almanac  bears 
to  new  discoveries  in  the  science  of  navigation.  It  would 
scarcely  have  the  influence  upon  the  advance  of  epistemology 
which  may  be  expected  for  astronomy  from  the  modern  use 
of  photography  in  mapping  out  and  numbering  the  stars. 

The  discussion  of  the  limits  of  knowledge,  in  order  to  be 
illumining  and  fruitful  even  in  the  slightest  degree,  must 
begin  and  proceed  by  holding  fast  to  certain  distinctions. 
Of  these,  the  first,  both  in  time  and  in  importance,  is  the 
distinction  between  the  limits  of  knowledge  and  the  presup- 
positions of  knowledge.  In  some  sort,  to  be  sure,  the  latter 
may  be  regarded  as  setting  limits  to  cognition,  because  they 
do  mark  out  the  boundaries  within  which  the  entire  system 
of  human  cognitions  lies.  This  amounts  to  saying  that,  un- 
less certain  conditions  are  assumed  as  being  fulfilled,  no 
knowledge  is  possible;  but  that  these  same  conditions,  being 
actually  met  in  all  the  origin  and  growth  of  cognition,  defin- 
itively settle  the  bounds  within  which  the  rise  and  progress 
of  all  human  knowledge  takes  place. 

But  now  by  a  strange  leap  which  is,  logically  considered, 
a  paralogism,  and,  practically  considered,  a  mark  of  natural 
perversity,  these  same  conditions  are  spoken  of  as  though 


DEGREES,  LIMITS,  AND  KINDS,  OF  KNOWLEDGE    247 

they  cramped  and  hindered  cognition.  A  man's  skin,  as 
marking  off  the  superficial  area  of  the  different  members  of 
his  organism  in  a  smooth,  continuous  way,  is  the  natural 
limit  of  his  body.  Inasmuch  as  it  has  most  important  phys- 
iological, nervous,  and  sesthetical  functions,  it  is  an  indis- 
pensable condition  of  the  healthy  existence,  and  even  of  the 
existence  at  all,  of  the  entire  body.  But  it  can  scarcely  be 
spoken  of  with  propriety  as  a  hindrance  to  his  larger  and 
freer  development,  as  a  bodily  organism  ;  nor  is  it  desirable 
to  attempt  the  problem  of  getting  "  out  of  one's  own  skin  " 
in  order  the  better  to  realize  what  an  unlimited  extension  of 
the  human  body  possibly  may  be. 

In  the  case  of  that  knowledge  which  comes  through  the 
senses,  we  use  the  word  "  limits  "  with  a  possible  application 
in  both  of  two  directions.  Each  one  of  the  senses  has  its 
natural  limitations  of  capacity,  fitted  to  the  peculiar  function 
which  it  is  intended  to  perform.  Indeed,  each  sense  has  a 
number  of  limits  of  this  kind,  that  depend  upon  certain 
subordinate  differentiations  of  its  more  general  functions. 
Further,  these  limits  are  variable  for  different  human  beings, 
and  also  for  the  same  human  being  at  different  stages  of  his 
development,  or  under  different  circumstances.  And  yet  these 
limits  are  not  indefinitely  removable  for  any  individual  man 
or  for  the  whole  race,  so  far  as  our  knowledge  of  the  charac- 
teristics of  individuals  and  of  the  race  at  present  informs  us. 
The  limits  of  tones,  for  example,  are  those  corresponding  to 
between  24  and  24,000  vibrations  of  the  stimulus  in  a  second 
of  time  ;  but  in  individual  cases,  possibly,  between  14  and 
40,000  or  50,000.  The  limits  of  colors  are  for  most  eyes 
between  the  deep  red  and  the  violet  rays  ;  but  for  some,  the 
still  lower  red  and  the  ultra-violet  rays  are  visible.  Pos- 
sibly, a  few  eyes  can  see  the  halo  around  the  magnet  through 
which  an  electric  current  is  running,  although  to  far  the 
greater  number  there  is  no  halo  to  be  seen.  Yet,  again, 
have  not  all,  of  late,  been  made  to  see  things,  before  sup- 


248    DEGREES,  LIMITS,  AND  KINDS,  OF  KNOWLEDGE 

posed  invisible  to  all,  by  the  discovery  of  the  Roentgen  rays  ? 
But,  alas !  there  are  some,  on  the  other  hand,  who  are  tone- 
deaf  or  color-blind  ;  and  who,  therefore,  having  ears,  hear 
not,  and  having  eyes,  see  not  —  as  we  who  are  more  favored 
delight  to  hear  and  to  see. 

Not  only  is  the  range  of  the  particular  senses  limited, 
although  thus  indefinitely ;  but  also  the  number  of  these 
senses  in  all  may  be  spoken  of  as  limited,  in  somewhat  similar 
way.  Until  recently  the  orthodox  supposition  in  psychology 
held  that  the  special  senses  of  man  were  in  number  five,  — 
no  more  and  no  less ;  and  we  find  even  that  free-lance  and 
credulous  philosopher,  named  Schopenhauer,  speaking  sneer- 
ingly  of  any  assumption  that  other  senses  might  possibly  be 
avenues  of  cognition  for  human  beings,  as  of  a  "  sixth  sense  " 
for  bats.  But  modern  investigations  have  added  to  the  five 
senses  formerly  admitted  several  others ;  for  example,  a 
"  temperature  sense,"  a  "  joint  sense,"  and  perhaps  an  outfit 
of  "  sensations  of  position "  in  space  through  excitation  of 
the  semi-circular  canals, —  not  to  speak  of  the  debatable 
"muscular  sense,"  and  the  centrally  originated  sensations 
connected  with  the  cognition  of  the  Self  as  active  and  in- 
tensely alive.  Nor  is  it  quite  admissible  for  the  psychologist 
of  fair  mind  to  break  off  with  this  enumeration  in  such  man- 
ner as  to  announce  his  determination  to  admit  no  other 
kinds  of  "  sensation-stuff  "  (or,  to  use  Kant's  shifty  expres- 
sion, "  that-which-is-given ")  as  belonging  to  the  domain  of 
knowledge  through  sense.  Believers  in  telepathy,  clairvoy- 
ance, necromancy,  and  all  of  that  ilk,  would  probably  for  the 
present  most  wisely  have  their  claims  to  enter  the  clan  of  the 
"  scientists  "  pronounced  upon  as  "  not  proven."  For  our- 
selves, we  do  not  just  now  even  "  half-believe,"  not  to  say, 
know  that  these  avenues  can  bring  to  the  human  mind  aught 
regarding  the  Reality  which  is  not-ourselves.  But  the  phe- 
nomena which  fall  under  the  various  forms  of  "  far  sight," 
and  "  second  sight,"  and  extraordinary  "  insight,"  are  of  a 


DEGREES,  LIMITS,  AND  KINDS,  OF  KNOWLEDGE    249 

character  not  to  allow  of  an  off-hand  dogmatic  limitation  of 
the  borders  between  the  sensible  and  non-sensuous  worlds. 
They  do  show  plainly,  on  the  other  hand,  that  these  two 
worlds  so-called  are  really  one ;  the  two  are  capable,  there- 
fore, of  being  bound  into  the  unity  of  experience  through 
that  commercio  which  is  the  essence  of  knowledge,  in  an 
unknown  variety  of  ways. 

Our  experience,  considered  as  some  sort  of  a  totality  de- 
pendent upon  racial  characteristics  and  racial  development, 
suggests  at  this  point  a  somewhat  startling  conjecture. 
There  is  reason  to  surmise  that  the  lower  animals  constantly 
adjust  themselves  to  subtile  changes  in  their  environment, 
and  carry  out  in  that  environment  what  appears  to  us  a 
system  of  shrewd  plans,  through  their  experience  in  the  form 
of  obscure  and  confused  impressions  of  a  sensuous  kind. 
They  are  not,  however,  aware  of  themselves  or  of  their  ob- 
jects, in  all  this,  in  such  manner  as  to  entitle  the  stimu- 
lating and  guiding  acts  of  their  consciousness  to  be  called 
acts  of  cognitive  perception.  Psychology,  therefore,  speaks 
of  such  psychoses  as  instinct,  feeling,  tact,  etc.  But  human 
cognitive  development  is  to  be  explained,  for  individuals 
and  for  the  race,  only  if  recognition  is  made  of  a  constant 
relation  of  reciprocal  involution  and  evolution  between  such 
lower  forms  of  psychoses  and  genuine  states  of  cognitive 
perception. 

In  every  series  of  perceptive  acts  the  grounds  of  the  cogni- 
tive judgment  in  which  the  acts  terminate,  as  a  matter  of  fact, 
do  not  themselves  appear  in  consciousness.  In  other  words, 
what  determines  the  character  of  the  judgment  must  largely  be 
spoken  of,  in  every  case,  as  unrecognized  causes  rather  than 
reasons,  or  "  grounds  "  in  the  more  appropriate,  logical  mean- 
ing of  the  word.  Yet  the  judgment  is,  on  the  whole,  so 
reached  and,  when  reached,  so  found  possessed  of  the  neces- 
sary characteristics,  that  the  entire  process  is  fully  entitled 
to  be  called  an  act  of  cognition.  But,  on  the  other  hand, 


250     DEGREES,  LIMITS,  AND   KINDS,  OF  KNOWLEDGE 

the  grounds  of  cognitive  judgments,  as  they  consist  in  char- 
acteristic determinations  of  the  "  sensation-stuff,"  are  brought 
more  and  more  clearly  into  consciousness,  as  a  necessary 
element  in  the  growth  of  cognition  by  use  of  the  senses. 
Thus  whab  resembles  instinct,  blind  feeling,  and  tact  is 
constantly  being  taken  up  unconsciously  into  knowledge ; 
and  knowledge  itself  also  consists  in  consciously  recognizing 
the  presence  and  significance  of  a  great  number  of  factors 
which,  in  the  case  of  the  lower  animals,  appear  to  remain  as 
instinct,  blind  feeling,  and  tact. 

Now  this  process  of  reciprocal  involution  and  evolution, 
which  is  essential  to  the  growth  of  perceptive  cognition,  ren- 
ders it  possible  that  the  number  of  recognized  senses  pos- 
sessed and  intelligently  exercised  by  man  may  be  indefinitely 
increased.  And  connected  with  this  prospect  is  the  sure 
progress  of  the  physical  sciences,  helped  on  by  psychology, 
in  devising  means  of  knowing  what  things  are  by  use  of  these 
newly  discovered  senses.  A  generation  ago,  the  scientific 
observer  would  have  been  much  more  disposed  to  fix  rigid 
limits,  both  quantitative  and  qualitative,  within  which  all 
things,  so  far  as  visible,  must  be  known.  But  both  microscope 
and  telescope  have  extended  the  limits  of  seeing  the  minute 
and  the  remote  far  beyond  the  lines  formerly  drawn.  The 
spectroscope  has  made  vision  an  apparent  avenue  for  cogni- 
tion of  the  more  interior  nature  of  distant  bodies.  And  not 
only  this,  as  matter  of  chief  surprise  ;  but  all  of  a  sudden,  and 
lately,  we  have  had  revealed,  through  use  of  the  eyes,  under 
the  action  of  a  force  which  cannot  at  present  be  classified 
with  any  known  kind  of  force,  new  manifestations  of  matter 
in  hitherto  undiscovered  relations  to  the  senses  of  man.  How 
many  of  yet  more  startling  disclosures  may  not  await  the 
future  of  the  human  race !  Even  the  discovery  is  not  im- 
possible that  men  have  always  used  a  score  or  two  of  senses, 
instead  of  the  five  allowed  by  the  traditional  psychology ;  and 
the  future  may  bring  into  recognized  use,  for  largely  increased 


DEGREES,  LIMITS,  AND  KINDS,  OF  KNOWLEDGE     251 

knowledge  of  nature,  a  score  or  two  more  that  have  been 
hitherto  so  little  used  as  scarcely  to  be  entitled  to  the  claim  to 
exist. 

It  should,  of  course,  be  said  that,  after  all,  our  knowledge 
of  things  through  the  senses  will  always  be  limited.  It  is 
safe  enough  to  predict  that  the  number  of  human  senses  will 
never  be  indefinitely  large;  and  that  the  number  of  distin- 
guishable sensations  which  rise  above  the  threshold  of  our 
human  consciousness  will  never  reach  infinity.  Moreover,  and 
quite  as  much  a  matter  of  course,  all  knowledge  of  this  sort 
will  be  limited  to  such  sides,  or  aspects,  or  forms  of  the 
activity  of  things  as  can  be  known  in  a  sensuous  way.  In 
reaction,  therefore,  against  this  limitation,  from  which  no 
reasonable  or  even  conceivable  means  of  escape  suggests  itself 
in  our  case,  it  is  customary  to  form  the  picture  of  beings  that 
cognize  things  in  other  and  preferable  ways.  Even  Kant,  as 
a  kind  of  subjective  correlate  to  his  Ding-an-sich,  admitted 
the  possibility  of  an  intuition  which  should  be  non-sensuous  ; 
and  this  intuition,  by  escaping  the  limitations  of  all  sense- 
intuition,  might  furnish  an  immediate  envisagement  of  the 
nature  of  Reality  itself. 

At  once,  however,  we  are  moved  to  inquire :  Whence  comes 
this  dissatisfaction  with  the  seeming  exterior  character  and 
the  irremovable  limits  of  the  human  knowledge  of  things  ?  To 
this  inquiry  our  discussions  have  already  provided  the  prompt 
and  incontestably  true  answer.  The  dissatisfaction  arises 
from  the  innermost  cognitive  nature  of  man.  But  whence 
comes  the  fair  picture  of  a  possible  kind  of  knowledge  which 
shall,  at  least  in  great  measure,  remove  the  dissatisfaction, — 
a  kind  of  knowledge  that  shall  not  leave  things  still  external 
to  us  and  leave  us  feeling  shut  off  from  the  true  nature  of 
things  ?  To  this  inquiry  also,  the  prompt  and  incontestably 
true  answer  has  already  been  furnished  :  It  comes  from  the 
depths  of  man's  rational  experience  with  himself.  It  is  the 
picture  of  a  being  that  shall  be  so  constituted  as  to  know  things^ 


252    DEGREES,  LIMITS,  AND  KINDS,  OF  KNOWLEDGE 

perchance  to  know  all  things,  as  man  knows  himself.  For  the 
Self  is  known  with  an  intuition  which,  so  far  as  it  goes, 
both  furnishes  and  guarantees  the  correspondence  of  the 
object  of  cognition  with  the  reality  cognized.  But  things, 
as  to  their  nature  beyond  the  negative  definition  of  a  being- 
not-me,  are  only  analogically  known.  It  is  the  recognition 
of  this  fundamental  difference  and  the  conception  of  a  being 
that  shall  transcend  this  difference  by  having  an  experience 
which  gives  the  cognition  of  things  to  the  Self,  after  the  man- 
ner in  which  the  cognition  of  Self  is  given  to  us,  that  leads 
men  to  speak  of  irremovable  limits  to  human  knowledge  by 
the  senses. 

It  is  more  usual  to  discourse  of  the  "  limits  "  of  scientific 
knowledge  in  a  meaning  quite  different  from  the  foregoing. 
"  Science  "  is  supposed  to  be  knowledge  par  excellence,  the 
only  cognition  which  will  bear  the  tests  that  are  necessary  to 
separate  between  the  genuine,  trustworthy  metal  and  the 
baser  admixtures  of  opinion,  belief,  and  mere  abstractions. 
But  those  who  have  most  confidence  in  the  validity  of  all 
truly  scientific  knowledge,  and  -most  pride  in  its  recent  rapid 
advances,  are  readiest  to  admit  that  its  achievements  hitherto 
have  compassed  no  appreciable  percentage  of  what  remains 
yet  for  science  to  do.  Its  field  is,  therefore,  thought  of  as 
narrow  and  limited  in  comparison  with  the  extent  of  nature 
at  large,  regarded  as  a  possible  object  for  scientific  research 
and  scientific  discovery.  Now,  science  lays  emphasis  on  that 
knowledge  which  has  taken  the  form  of  the  universal,  in  dis- 
tinction from  the  particulars  of  individual  acts  of  cognition, 
whether  of  things  or  of  Self.  Science  is  knowledge  of  the 
generic  characteristics  of  large  numbers  of  individuals  and  of 
general  laws,  or  of  the  uniform  modes  of  the  behavior  of 
the  individuals  under  certain  definitively  fixed  relations  to 
each  other. 

It  is  admitted,  however,  that  in  order  to  have  a  system  of 
judgments  which  states  the  characteristics  and  laws  of  things 


DEGREES,  LIMITS,  AND  KINDS,  OF  KNOWLEDGE     253 

and  which  may  be  considered  as  scientific  knowledge,  the 
grounds  of  connection  must  be  made  more  or  less  clear  and 
defensible  between  this  system  of  conceptual  judgments 
and  those  cognitive  judgments  which  are  terminals  of  the 
particular  processes  of  perception  and  of  self-consciousness. 
The  bearing  of  such  a  connection  upon  our  view  of  the  validity 
and  extent  of  human  knowledge  will  become  evident  through 
subsequent  discussions  from  somewhat  altered  points  of  view. 
From  the  present  point  of  view  it  appears  simply  that  the  case 
of  that  conceptual  knowledge  at  which  science  aims  is  not, 
so  far  as  the  application  of  the  word  "  limits  "  is  concerned, 
markedly  different  from  the  case  of  perception  through  the 
senses.  The  range  of  what  is  already  known  appears,  in  fact, 
exceedingly  small  in  comparison  with  the  conjectured  extent 
of  what  may  possibly  yet  be  known.  In  fact,  also,  the  amount 
of  that  which  is  known  constantly  increases.  But  since  first- 
hand evidence  in  the  form  of  immediate  cognitive  judgments 
must  somewhere  be  furnished,  or  else  our  so-called  science 
lacks  a  sure  ground  of  standing  in  reality  and  becomes  mere 
thinking  and  imagining  rather  than  assured  knowledge,  the 
limits  of  sense-perception  set  certain  limits  to  the  science  of 
things. 

Here  emerges,  however,  a  very  important  difference  between 
scientific  knowledge  and  immediate  cognition  through  the 
senses.  Science  is  not  content  with  knowing  enough  about 
things  simply  to  use  them  cunningly.  It  aims  at  explaining 
things.  As  has  already  been  said,  it  claims  to  state  its  cogni- 
tions in  a  system  of  judgments  about  universals, —  about  kinds 
of  things  and  about  the  laws  of  their  behavior  in  manifold  re- 
lations. Now  the  knowledge  of  facts,  even  when  of  the  clearest 
and  surest,  by  no  means  carries  with  it  the  knowledge  of  the 
explanation  of  the  same  facts.  And  men  are  constantly  find- 
ing out  that  the  most  frequent  and  familiar  of  facts,  as 
cognitively  apprehended,  become  the  most  complicated  and 
mysterious  when  an  explanation  of  them  is  demanded.  To 


254    DEGREES,  LIMITS,  AND  KINDS,  OF  KNOWLEDGE 

know  "  that,"  and  a  little  of  "  what,"  is  not  to  know  all  of 
what  or  any  of  "  why."  It  is  no  wonder,  then,  that  the  limits 
of  scientific  knowledge,  although  actually  widening,  seem  to 
be  growing  narrower  in  comparison  with  the  boundless  extent 
of  the  scientifically  knowable  that  is  as  yet  unknown.  Thus 
we  may,  on  the  one  hand,  contemplate  the  fair  prospect  of 
more  rapid  advance  for  the  particular  sciences  in  the  future 
than  has  been  at  any  time  in  the  past  history  of  the  race. 
We  may  even  expect  the  fulfilment  of  those  aspirations 
which,  in  germinal  form,  led  Paracelsus  to  declare  :  — 

"  Thus  I  possess 

Two  sorts  of  knowledge ;  one,  —  vast,  shadowy, 
Hints  of  the  unbounded  aim  I  once  pursued : 
The  other  consists  of  many  secrets,  — caught 
While  bent  on  nobler  prize,  —  perhaps  a  few 
Prime  principles  which  may  conduct  to  much." 

And  should  this  increased  knowledge  of  facts  and  .causes  be 
followed  by  a  corresponding  growth  of  skill  and  art,  then  dia- 
monds may  be  turned  out  (no  longer  mere  black  pin-heads) 
from  crucibles  .filled  a  few  hours  ago  with  charcoal;  and 
this  charcoal  itself  may  be  no  longer  needed  for  fuel  in  an 
age  when  the  atmosphere  yields  freely  its  thermo-dynamic 
resources. 

On  the  other  hand,  this  expected  realization  of  the  Tales  of 
the  Arabian  Nights,  under  the  improved  moral  restrictions 
of  modern  civilization,  will  itself  be  a  limited  affair.  There 
will  still  remain  —  so  we  are  accustomed  to  say  in  mocking 
self-pity  or  in  childish  complaint  —  the  infinite  ocean  of  undis- 
covered truth ;  and  the  greatest  men  in  science  will  still  be 
little  children  gathering  a  few  pebbles  upon  the  shore.  How 
rarely  is  it  remembered  that,  by  this  manner  of  looking  at  the 
intellect  of  man  and  at  the  nature  of  the  Reality  with  which 
he  supposes  himself  to  hold  commerce  of  an  intellectual  kind, 
assumptions  are  being  justified  that  reach  even  beyond  those 
for  which  science  is  wont  to  rebuke  the  theologian  or  the  meta- 
physician of  the  most  dogmatic  type ! 


DEGREES,  LIMITS,  AND  KINDS,  OF  KNOWLEDGE    255 

As  every  student  of  the  problem  and  history  of  episte- 
mology  knows  perfectly  well,  the  question  of  limits  presents 
itself  in  a  yet  more  trying  and  dangerous  form  to  our  critical 
thinking.  In  Kant's  celebrated  chapter,  "  On  the  Ground  of 
the  Distinction  of  Objects  in  general  into  Phenomena  and 
Noumena "  he  compares  the  whole  domain  of  "  pure  under- 
standing" to  an  island  "enclosed  by  nature  itself  within 
limits  that  can  never  be  changed."  "A  wide  and  stormy 
ocean,"  full  of  fog-banks  and  of  ice,  surrounds  this  island ;  it 
is  "the  home  of  illusion,"  but  the  island  is  the  country  of 
truth.  If  now  we  inquire  of  this  critical  explorer,  who  has 
just  surveyed  the  entire  island  and  laid  it  out  with  his  ana- 
lytic spade  after  the  fashion  of  a  French  garden  in  the  last 
century,  what  constitutes  the  unchangeable  and  hopelessly 
fixed  limits,  the  reply  is  somewhat  remarkable.  The  "  limits  " 
are  the  constitution  of  the  island  itself.  But  one  might  reason- 
ably expect  to  be  told  the  rather :  The  limits  are  the  sur- 
rounding "  wide  and  stormy  ocean."  And,  indeed,  upon  this 
same  ocean  Kant,  the  great  explorer,  bravely  sets  sail  with 
the  four  tables  of  the  categories  for  his  chart,  and  the  interests 
of  a  faith  which  is  to  take  the  place  of  knowledge,  when  the 
latter  has  been  "  removed,"  lying  heavy  on  his  heart.  Thus 
guided  and  ballasted,  as  it  were,  he  discovers  in  the  entire 
explorable  extent  of  this  ocean  three  will-o'-the-wisp  ideas, 
which,  although  they  are  not  even  to  be  spoken  of  as  stars? 
descried  from  the  island  through  the  ocean's  mist,  and  set 
there  by  the  good  God  to  guide  aright  poor  mariners,  must 
nevertheless  be  followed  and  believed  in  as  real ;  and  so,  if 
followed,  they  will  lead  to  the  practical  faith  which  reposes 
content  within  a  recognized  illusion  as  its  "  fictive  "  haven. 

But  perhaps  sufficient  fault  has  already  been  found  with  the 
"  Critique  of  Pure  Reason  "  for  its  off-hand  identification  of  the 
presuppositions  of  all  cognition  —  especially  those  of  a  for- 
mal sort  —  with  limits  or  barriers  that  mark  off  and  exclude 
cognition  from  the  world  of  the  trans-subjective.  The  exam- 


256    DEGREES,  LIMITS,  AND  KINDS,  OF  KNOWLEDGE 

ination  given  hitherto  to  the  nature  of  knowledge  has  cer- 
tainly not  justified  a  premature  confidence  in  warrants  for 
this  leap  into  agnosticism.  To  refute  it  further,  and  to  con- 
firm a  mature  confidence  in  more  positive  and  reassuring 
conclusions,  requires  no  little  of  remaining  critical  work. 
The  supposition  that  human  knowledge  cannot  sufficiently 
commend  and  enforce  its  own  ontological  implicates  must 
lead  to  the  inquiry  as  to  what  these  implicates  are,  and  as 
to  the  terms  on  which  they  are  given  to  the  intellect  for  its 
acceptance  or  rejection.  The  denial  of  the  power  of  experi- 
ence to  transcend  its  own  limits  must  be  met  with  a  pro- 
founder  examination  of  the  concept  of  experience,  with  a  view 
to  see  whether  aught  that  is  so  self-limited  corresponds  to 
our  actual  experience.  When  scepticism  and  agnosticism 
challenge  our  cognition  to  recognize  its  limits,  it  is  time  to 
send  the  challenge  back,  and  to  inquire  what  are  the  neces- 
sary limits  of  scepticism  and  of  agnosticism.  And,  finally, 
the  very  doctrine  of  the  "  relativity  of  all  knowledge  "  irresis- 
tibly brings  on  the  inquiry  whether  this  term,  too,  does  not 
also  imply  the  absolute  nature  of  some  human  knowledge. 

Only  when  these  and  kindred  discussions  have  been  con- 
ducted to  an  issue  in  an  unavoidable  agnosticism  can  we  con- 
sent to  consider  favorably  the  merits  of  a  doctrine  which 
speaks  of  knowledge  as  though  its  presuppositions,  and  even 
its  necessary  objective  implicates,  could  properly  be  turned 
into  fixed  barriers  of  human  mental  activity.  There  is  quite 
too  much  apriorism  to  suit  a  genuinely  critical  student  of  the 
epistemological  problem  in  the  off-hand  assumption  that  the 
so-called  "  categories  "  are  hindrances  to  a  cognition  of  Reality, 
rather  than  forms  of  its  truthful  mental  representation. 

Meantime,  the  preliminary  truth  which  has  been  derived 
from  previous  discussions  may  be  stated  in  the  form  of  a  cau- 
tion :  Transcendent  entities  and  principles,  made  use  of  in  the 
interests  of  explaining  experience  in  general,  must  be  derived 
from  a  basis  of  concrete  experiences  with  acknowledged  actual- 


DEGREES,  LIMITS,  AND  KINDS,  OF  KNOWLEDGE    257 

ities.  Here  the  relation  of  content  and  form,  of  substantial 
existence  and  mode  of  mental  procedure,  is  such  that  the  two 
cannot  be  considered  or  criticised  apart.  The  universal  mode 
of  mental  procedure  by  which  we  explicate  the  transcendent 
that  is  implicate  in  our  experience  is  a  movement  of  cognitive 
judgments  under  the  principle  known  as  "  sufficient  reason." 
Whenever,  then,  a  connection  of  judgments  established  in  this 
way  leads  us  beyond  the  limits  of  individual  experiences,  the 
advance  thus  gained  carries  with  it  the  content  that  is  impli- 
cate in  the  form.  This  is  a  genuine  advance  of  knowledge, 
as  distinguished  from  an  endless  wandering  over  "  the  wide 
and  stormy  ocean  "  of  illusion,  in  the  vain  attempt  to  convert 
mere  imaginings  and  abstractions  into  content  of  truth,— 
after  the  fashion  described  in  the  Kantian  "  transcendental 
dialectic." 

Any  discussion  of  the  Kinds  of  Knowledge,  from  the  epis- 
temological  point  of  view  and  with  the  intention  to  make  the 
discussion  yield  fruit  for  the  science  of  epistemology,  must 
constantly  regard  two  very  simple  practical  rules  :  The  dif- 
ferent species  distinguished  must  all  belong  to  the  one  genus, 
—  namely,  knowledge ;  and  the  principles  of  division  accord- 
ing to  which  it  is  proposed  to  break  up  this  genus  into  species 
must  be  intelligently  chosen  and  consistently  maintained. 

In  violation  of  the  first  rule,  Schopenhauer,  after  berating 
Kant  soundly  (and,  indeed,  not  without  a  show  of  reasons) 
for  exalting  conceptual  above  perceptual  knowledge,  proceeds 
himself  to  reverse  the  positions  of  the  two  so  as  virtually,  by 
some  of  his  expressions,  to  deprive  the  former  of  all  claim 
to  be  called  "  knowledge."  Indeed,  it  would  seem  to  be  by  a 
kind  of  non-sensuous  intuition,  such  as  Kant  thought  super- 
human beings  alone  could  possess,  that  Schopenhauer  arrives 
at  the  cognition  of  the  essence  of  Thing-in-itself  as  "  Will." 
But  how  can  one  speak  of  kinds  and  degrees  of  knowing 
without  admitting  that,  considered  as  to  its  essential  charac- 
teristics, there  is  only  one  kind  of  knowledge  ?  "  Kinds  "  — 

17 


258    DEGREES,  LIMITS,  AND   KINDS,  OF  KNOWLEDGE 

in  this  case,  as  in  every  other  case — are  only  subordinate 
species  of  the  one  genus  or  kind.  What  the  essential  marks 
of  this  genus  are,  what  is  the  genuine  concept  of  knowledge, 
has  surely  been  discussed  at  sufficient  length.  The  discussion 
has  shown  that  perception  and  intuition,  without  thinking, 
never  amount  to  cognition;  but  also  that  mere  conceiving, 
mere  judging,  and  especially  abstracting  from  all  content  of  a 
quasi-intuitive  sort,  can  neither  impart  nor  advance  knowl- 
edge. So  that  when  cognition  by  intuition  or  envisagement 
and  cognition  by  abstraction  and  thought  fall  into  a  quarrel 
over  the  question  which  of  the  two  is  entitled  to  stand  highest 
along  the  scale  of  surety  or  of  worth,  they  are  obliged  in  good 
earnest  to  admit  each  other's  claims,  or  they  cannot  rationally 
even  begin  the  quarrel.  The  same  thought  arises  when  men 
of  science  are  heard  depreciating  men  of  practical  or  artistic 
insight,  or  the  reverse  ;  and  when  men  of  firm  faith  denounce 
the  rationalism  of  those  who  do  not  reason  as  they  do,  or  men 
of  active  intellects  decry  the  credulity  of  those  whose  belief 
differs  from  their  own.  For  cognition  itself  is  impossible  with- 
out both  insight  and  argument ;  and  all  men  must  both  believe 
and  think  in  order  to  know  at  all. 

If,  however,  the  fundamental  facts  as  to  the  nature  of  cog- 
nition are  borne  constantly  in  mind,  several  different  divisions 
of  cognition  may  be  made,  according  to  different  points  of 
view  and  changing  principles  of  division.  One  of  the  most 
important  of  these  attempts  at  classification  distinguishes  the 
pure  —  often  called  a  priori  —  kind  of  knowledge  from  that 
which  is  empirical, — sometimes  called  a  posteriori.  Of  the 
former,  the  science  of  mathematics  is  the  accepted  type ;  and 
other  kinds  of  knowledge  stand,  in  the  scale  of  purity,  nearer 
to  or  more  remote  from  the  type,  according  to  the  degrees  of 
their  approach  to  mathematics  in  the  character  of  their  rea- 
soning and  in  the  certainty  of  their  conclusions.  This  entire 
distinction,  however,  is  usually  carried  out  in  a  manner  to 
contradict  or  obscure  a  true  philosophical  doctrine  of  knowl- 


DEGREES,  LIMITS,  AND  KINDS,  OF  KNOWLEDGE    259 

edge.  For  just  so  far  as  mathematics  and  the  so-called  math- 
ematical sciences  constitute  a  body  of  cognitions,  and  not  a 
mere  system  of  abstractions,  they  are  built  up  as  are  all  struc- 
tures of  a  cognitive  kind ;  that  is  to  say,  they  consist  of  a 
number  of  connected  judgments,  which  have  their  source  and 
their  verification  in  a  trustworthy  commerce  of  mind  with 
really  existent  things.  The  view  which  regards  mathematics 
and  the  mathematical  sciences  as  a  sort  of  sensuous  trans- 
cript or  copy  of  ready-made  things,  regarded  as  standing  in 
extra-mental  relations  to  one  another,  and  the  view  which 
regards  them  as  purely  thought-constructions,  having  no  need 
of  concrete  self-consciousness  or  of  perceptions  by  the  senses, 
are  both  equally  untenable.  Like  all  other  cognitions,  these 
also  are  developed  by  the  application  of  thought  to  our  con- 
crete experiences  with  ourselves  and  with  things.  And  the 
moment  mathematical  conceptions  wander  away  from  the 
path  in  which  they  can  make  valid  connection  with  these 
concrete  experiences,  they  cease  to  be  cognitive  in  any  defen- 
sible meaning  of  that  term. 

One  of  the  most  valuable  of  the  subordinate  truths  taught 
by  Kant  in  the  "  Critique  of  Pure  Reason  "  is  the  necessity  of 
finding  the  source  and  verification  for  all  our  mathematical 
knowledge  in  what  he  considers  a  priori  activity  of  the  con- 
structive and  synthetic  imagination.  If  one  wants  to  know 
what  a  straight  line  actually  is,  then  one  must  draw  it,  by  an 
act  of  constructive  imagination.  But  Kant  does  not  empha- 
size the  truth  that  such  drawing  of  a  straight  line  is  quite 
impossible  for  a  mind  that  has  not  previously  traced  some 
line,  as  seen  or  felt,  actually  limiting  a  thing  perceived  by  the 
senses.  That  is  to  say,  the  grounds  for  the  conception  of  a 
straight  line,  on  which  the  foundations  of  all  mathematics  of 
the  geometrical  order  and  all  the  mathematical  sciences  them- 
selves are  standing,  are  given  only  in  the  cognitive  judgment 
which  terminates  a  series  of  sense-perceptions.  This  process 
is  an  envisagement  by  thinking  mind  of  the  nature  of  the 


260    DEGREES,  LIMITS,  AND  KINDS,  OF  KNOWLEDGE 

really  existent  as  given  to  it  in  the  object  of  sense-percep- 
tion. What  is  true  of  those  processes  that  constitute  the 
actual  experiences  in  which  we  come  to  the  knowledge  of  the 
properties  of  a  straight  line,  is  true  of  all  the  experience  which 
furnishes  all  the  other  primary  conceptions  and  axioms  of 
geometry.  As  a  science,  a  system  of  cognitions,  it  is  not  a 
mere  product  of  imagination  or  of  thought,  much  less  of 
mere  aggregated  sensations  or  of  associated  ideas.  It  is 
rather  a  product  of  the  entire  mind  in  its  actual,  living  com- 
merce with  things. 

Whenever  Kant  discusses  the  nature  and  origin  of  those 
cognitive  judgments  which  make  up  the  science  of  arithmetic, 
the  other  of  the  only  two  divisions  of  mathematics,  he  is  more 
than  ordinarily  unsatisfactory  in  his  account  of  their  episte- 
mological  character.  Arithmetic  is,  in  fact,  from  beginning 
to  end,  nothing  but  counting.  The  activity  of  the  mind  in 
the  cognitive  processes  which  enter  into  counting  is,  however, 
exceedingly  complex.  It  involves  all  the  intellectual  powers  ; 
it  both  promotes  and  implies  the  development  of  time-con- 
sciousness ;  it  involves  recognitive  memory  and  self-conscious- 
ness. As  applied  to  Things  instead  of  the  successive  states  of 
the  Self,  counting  can  at  first  be  done  only  in  connection  with 
and  in  dependence  upon  successive  acts  of  the  concrete  cog- 
nition of  things  through  the  senses.  All  the  science  of  num- 
bers, as  well  as  the  science  of  space  relations,  has  its  sure 
foundations,  as  science  (as  knowledge  and  not  mere  imagin- 
ings, or  thoughts,  or  beliefs),  in  that  commerce  with  Reality 
which  all  men  have  through  actual,  concrete  sense-perceptions. 

What,  however,  shall  be  said  of  the  claims  of  that  mighty 
and  towering  superstructure  of  mathematics,  rising  higher 
and  still  higher  with  speculations  so  sublimated  that  only  a 
handful  of  initiated  priests  can  even  discern  the  meaning  of 
its  mysteries,  but  which  often  makes  claims  to  be  a  temple  of 
knowledge  par  excellence  ?  In  answering  this  question,  one 
must  remain  faithful  to  a  critical  epistemology,  neither  hiding 


DEGREES,  LIMITS,  AND  KINDS,  OF  KNOWLEDGE     261 

anything  of  truth  by  interposing  the  agnostic  doubt,  nor  set- 
ting down  to  the  credit  of  mathematics  admissions  which 
would  annul  all  true  conceptions  of  the  nature  of  knowledge. 
The  truth  lies  in  the  middle  path.  Mathematics  can  increase 
human  knowledge,  both  in  the  number  of  its  true  judgments 
and  in  the  degree  of  clearly  discernible  evidence  on  which 
they  are  consciously  made  to  repose.  But  mathematical  rea- 
soning alone  can  never  furnish  us  with  truth ;  because  it  can 
never,  of  itself  as  it  were,  amount  to  genuine  cognition.  So 
far  as  the  system  of  judgments  which  it  develops  can  connect 
themselves  with  the  known  nature  and  actual  relations  of  real 
things,  this  system  forms  a  part  of  the  explanatory  science  of 
things.  But  so  far  as  it  cannot  make  this  connection,  the 
clearness  and  cogency  of  the  arrangements  which  it  produces 
between  its  own  abstractions  give  it  no  claim  to  be  called  a 
form  of  "  knowledge." 

Here  we  may  fitly  raise  again  the  question  touched  upon  in 
a  preceding  chapter  (pp.  143  f.).  What  do  I  really  know  when 
I  affirm  as  true  some  relation  of  mathematical  symbols  which 
I  have  reached  as  the  result  of  days  of  hard  work  and  pages 
of  figuring  and  plotting  of  curves  ?  Not  necessarily  more  than 
this :  namely,  that,  starting  from  certain  assumptions  of 
abstract  relations  between  mere  concepts,  I  have  argued,  in 
accordance  with  accepted  mathematical  rules,  to  the  conclu- 
sion of  certain  similar  relations  between  even  more  abstract 
concepts.  Thus  much  is  true  ;  and  I  know  it  to  be  true.  But 
the  instant  I  propose  to  apply  this  process  of  argument,  or  its 
assumptions,  or  its  conclusion,  to  any  actually  existent  rela- 
tions between  real  beings,  I  am  met  by  the  prior  question : 
"  How  do  you  know  that  the  nature  of  real  beings  admits  of 
their  entering  into  these  peculiar  mathematical  relations  ? " 
And  even  if  the  assumptions,  in  which  the  argumentative 
start  began,  were  known  to  be  applicable  to  things,  it  by  no 
means  follows  that  the  calculated  extensions  of  those  rela- 
tions admit  of  such  an  application.  For  things  may  not  be 


262     DEGREES,  LIMITS,  AND  KINDS,  OF  KNOWLEDGE 

constructed  mathematically  all  the  way  through  ("  according 
to  Euclid,"  or  "  to  Gunter,"  as  we  might  say).  Indeed, 
things  do  not  appear  to  be  mathematical  throughout.  And 
there  is  probably  no  greater  or  more  mischievous  fallacy 
current  in  scientific  circles  at  the  present  time  than  that  of 
supposing  that  a  knowledge  of  reality,  or  indeed  any  real 
extension  of  knowledge,  can  come  chiefly  in  this  way.  How 
the  failure  to  observe  the  difference  between  mathematical 
abstractions  and  the  reality  of  things  has  led  to  vain  puzzles 
and  to  important  errors,  from  the  conundrum  about  Achilles 
and  the  tortoise  dowii  to  the  antinomies  of  Kant,  we  shall 
consider  elsewhere. 

Some  light  is  thrown  upon  the  epistemological  problem  by 
considering  the  effect  of  distinctions  in  time  as  present,  past, 
and  future,  upon  the  resulting  kinds  of  knowledge.  Undoubt- 
edly memory  and  inference  are  necessary  to  the  cognition  of 
what  appears,  in  time,  as  present  matter-of-fact.  Indeed  it 
has  been  seen  that  memory  and  thinking  necessarily  enter 
into  all  cognitive  processes.  But  the  knowledge  of  the  object 
here-and-now  present,  whether  that  object  be  the  Self  or  some 
Thing,  differs  from  the  knowledge  of  the  same  object  by  an  act 
of  recognitive  memory.  Experimental  investigation  of  the 
laws  which  govern  the  fading  of  the  memory  image,  and  abun- 
dant experience  with  errors  of  memory,  combine  to  show  that, 
as  respects  its  surety,  cognition  by  memory  is  inferior  to  the 
immediate  cognition  of  self-consciousness  and  of  sense-percep- 
tion. It  is,  however,  primarily  with  regard  to  the  intensity  of 
belief  in  the  reality  of  the  object  cognized  that  the  difference 
is  noticeable.  Not  infrequently  the  cognitive  judgment  is 
more  discriminating  when  it  is  based  upon  memory  than 
when  based  upon  the  process  known  as  immediate  intuition. 
Sources  of  error  which  arise  in  the  affective  consciousness 
generally  account  for  this.  On  the  other  hand,  the  fallibility 
of  memory  is  as  much  a  commonplace  as  are  the  errors  of 
sense  or  the  foibles  of  self-knowledge. 


It  is  not  in  these  subjective  conditions  alone,  however,  that 
our  superior  confidence  in  present  cognition  is  based.  As  we 
project  ourselves  backward  in  time  by  an  act  of  imagination, 
we  do  not  feel  so  sure  that  things  themselves  were  not  mark- 
edly different  in  the  past  from  what  we  now  know  them  to  be. 
Nor  does  our  own  cherished  and  well-remembered  Self  escape 
wholly  from  this  doubt.  Do  I  remember  how  I  thought,  felt, 
and  planned — what  manner  of  one  I  was  —  in  childhood  or 
in  infancy,  so  that  I  can  affirm  knowledge  on  the  basis  of  this 
memory,  even  when  I  have  apparent  memory  to  bring  for- 
ward in  proof  ?  All  men,  therefore,  think  it  right  to  bolster 
up  even  the  clearest  recognitive  memories  of  what  was, 
especially  if  the  time  concerned  was  remote,  by  arguing  as 
to  what  must  have  been.  Thus  opinions  of  memory  are  helped 
up  to  the  rank  of  cognitions  by  the  arm  of  rational  inference. 
The  individual  fact  is  thus  certified  to  by  an  appeal  to  its 
connection  with  the  universal  in  experience.  Yet,  again, 
the  most  assured  scientific  knowledge  of  things  suffers  from 
the  weakening  effect  of  long  stretches  of  time.  Scientific 
knowledge  is,  by  nature,  universal  and  so  avowedly  inde- 
pendent of  time.  But  he  would  be  too  bold  a  teacher  of 
science  who  should  be  just  as  sure  of  any  principle  when 
applied  to  the  physical  realities  of  countless  ages  ago  as  when 
applied  to  the  system  of  things  known  to  be  existent  to-day. 
This  certainly  looks  —  does  it  not  ?  —  as  though  the  so-called 
"  system  of  things  "  might  really  be  a  Life,  changing  its  modes 
of  manifestation  or  self-realization  in  accordance  with  imma- 
nent Ideas,  rather  than  a  collection  of  rigid  entities,  blindly 
subject  in  a  mechanical  way  to  unchanging  laws. 

In  answer  to  the  inquiry  whether  knowledge  of  the  future 
is  possible,  a  negative  reply  rises  most  readily  to  one's  lips. 
But  it  cannot  be  admitted  that  the  future  is  wholly  unknow- 
able without  virtually  destroying  the  foundations  of  all  knowl- 
edge. Indeed,  all  practical  cognition,  or  all  cognition  put  to 
use  in  any  way,  implies  the  right  and  the  power  to  predict. 


264    DEGREES,  LIMITS,  AND  KINDS,  OF  KNOWLEDGE 

As  a  mechanical  engineer,  after  a  thorough  examination,  I 
may  affirm,  "  I  know  the  bridge  is  safe."  The  judgment, 
"  the  bridge  is  safe,"  implies  the  prediction,  "  This  same 
bridge  will  not,  the  next  instant,  fall  of  its  own  weight."  But 
is  it  not,  after  all,  possible  that  the  bridge  may  go  down  ;  and 
do  I  surely  know  that  it  will  not  ?  Now  if  one  answers  this 
question  by  saying  that,  "abstractly  considered,"  such  a 
catastrophe  is  possible,  the  retort  follows  that  the  question 
does  not  concern  abstract  considerations,  but  concerns  rather 
the  grounds  of  the  possible  cognition  of  what  will  actually  be. 
And  if  it  is  further  said  that,  perchance,  some  error  has  crept 
into  the  calculations,  and  therefore  the  bridge  may  fall,  then 
the  reply  is  that  such  error  vitiates  the  declaration,  "  The 
bridge  is  safe,"  and  converts  it  into  a  judgment  of  opinion, 
instead  of  a  truly  cognitive  judgment. 

Even  in  the  case  of  a  judgment  declarative  of  a  fact  of  per- 
ception, an  implied  reference  to  the  future  validity  of  the 
judgment,  if  it  is  truly  cognitive,  cannot  be  avoided.  "  The 
snow  is  white ;  but  the  clothing  of  the  man  standing  upon  the 
snow  is  black."  Such  a  statement,  in  order  to  lay  claim  for 
recognition  as  knowledge,  must  imply  something  more  than  a 
merely  subjective  connection  of  forms  of  mental  representa- 
tion. It  is  understood  to  imply  an  objective  connection  main- 
taining itself  between  the  "  momenta  "  and  relations  of  really 
existent  beings.  It  follows  that  the  judgment  must  bear 
examination  in  order  to  be  true;  it  must  have  enough  of 
stability  in  the  world  of  things  to  repeat  itself  in  my  mind 
and  in  the  minds  of  others.  If  now,  when  I  look  again, 
the  snow  is  no  longer  white  and  the  clothing  of  the  man 
standing  upon  the  snow  is  no  longer  black,  why,  then  the 
former  judgment  was  not  cognitive  —  unless,  indeed,  the 
color  of  the  snow  and  of  the  clothing  has  somehow  been 
changed.  But  this  very  demand  for  a  "  reason  "  why  the 
former  judgment  should  not  be  withdrawn  as  erroneous,  or 
else  the  present  change  in  judgment  must  be  justified  by  an 


DEGREES,  LIMITS,  AND  KINDS,  OF  KNOWLEDGE    265 

appeal  to  some  new  grounds,  shows  the  nature  of  the  relation 
between  cognition  in  general  and  the  distinctions  of  time. 
Knowledge  resting  on  grounds  that  cannot  change  is  knowl- 
edge once  for  all ;  it  is  timeless  cognition,  and  must  imply 
knowledge  of  the  future  as  well  as  of  the  present  and  of  the 
past.  But  without  some  conscious  recognition  of  grounds  — 
at  least,  hurriedly  gathered  and  scanned,  although  perhaps 
scarcely  to  be  called  "consciously  recognized,"  after  all  —  no 
cognitive  judgment  can  be  laid  down.  And,  as  has  been  al- 
ready pointed  out,  the  more  conceptual  and  scientific  cog- 
nition becomes,  the  more  independent  it  becomes  of  the 
gnawing  tooth  of  time.  Scientific  knowledge  is  of  the  uni- 
versal ;  science  boasts  its  power  assuredly  to  predict  and  to 
lay  down  truths  that  are  independent  of  time. 

And  yet  this  claim  of  science  to  an  established  character, 
and  this  boast  of  the  power  to  extend  itself  into  the  indefinite 
future,  can  by  no  means  be  made  wholly  good.  For  we  are 
only  relatively  sure  of  the  unchanging  truth  of  our  most  firmly 
established  scientific  generalizations.  The  whole  system  of 
things  physical  may  possibly  be  completely  upset  to-morrow, 
—  "  possibly"  with  an  abstract  possibility.  But  if  one  cannot 
say  one  knows  it  actually  will  not  be,  one  cannot  claim  an 
absolute  certitude  for  any  system  of  scientific  cognitions. 
Here  it  is  exceedingly  important  to  notice  that  any  doubt  or 
agnosticism  which  may  afflict  the  mind  does  not  refer  to  the 
possibility  of  the  laws  of  our  intellects  undergoing  an  im- 
portant change.  Neither  is  it  due  to  a  recognition  of  the 
Kantian  claim  that  human  knowledge  does  not  reach  to 
noumena,  or  to  thing  s-in-themselv  eg.  The  rather  is  it  because 
men  are  sure  they  know  Reality  well  enough  to  engender 
reasonable  doubt  as  to  how  far  its  self-imposed  limits  to 
change  may  possibly  extend.  In  other  words,  we  know 
noumena,  or  things-in-themselves,  "  too  well "  to  trust  them 
indefinitely  to  confine  themselves  according  to  our  rules  as 
to  the  way  they  absolutely  must  change  in  the  future.  But  it 


is  just  this  very  independence  of  human  wills  which  things 
display  that  makes  them  known  to  human  minds  as  realities 
indeed.  ' 

Once  more,  then,  by  an  indirect  and  circuitous  path  we 
reach  the  discussion  of  certain  questions  left  over  in  the  very 
distinction  of  knowledge  from  other  kinds  of  conscious  states. 
Now  we  may  the  better  inquire  as  to  the  significance  of  the 
contention  of  Schopenhauer :  "  The  given  material  of  every 
philosophy  "  (of  all  cognition  in  actuality,  and  so  of  all  theo- 
retical discussion  of  the  problem  of  cognition)  "  is  accordingly 
nothing  else  than  the  empirical  consciousness,  which  di- 
vides itself  into  the  consciousness  of  one's  own  self  and  the 
consciousness  of  other  things."1  Conceptual  knowledge,  how- 
ever, is  the  elaboration  of  this  so-called  empirical  conscious- 
ness, in  such  manner  as  to  interpret  and  expand  its 
deliverances  for  the  formation  of  a  system  of  truths  that 
shall  have  a  claim  to  represent  the  system  of  really  existent 
beings,  the  Unity  of  the  World.  But  in  some  sort,  the  most 
fundamental  categories  of  Identity  and  Difference,  of  Process 
and  Change,  of  Relation  and  Causation,  are  one  thing  as 
applied  to  Self  and  another  thing  when  applied  to  physical 
beings  and  physical  transactions.  Thus  it  is  not  the  necessity 
of  logical  determination,  but  the  understanding  of  actuality, 
which  gives  the  law  and  the  goal  to  our  higher  cognitions. 

Thought  is  subject  to  logical  necessity :  oftener  than  not, 
perhaps,  actuality  is  what  it  is  as  a  fact ;  and  that  is  the  last 
word  on  the  subject.  The  actual  points  of  starting  for  the 
logical  development  of  concepts  of  experience  lies  just  where 
the  beginnings  of  experience  itself  lie  —  in  the  discriminat- 
ing and  integrating  activity  of  mind,  having  commerce  with 
particular  and  concrete  things.  But  logical  thinking  changes 
these  objects  of  self-consciousness  and  of  sense-perception, 
according  to  certain  points  of  view,  often  arbitrarily  chosen, 
into  logically  differentiated  objects  of  thought.  These  logical 

1  The  World  as  Will  and  Idea,  ii.  pp.  258  f. 


DEGREES,  LIMITS,  AND  KINDS,  OF  KNOWLEDGE    207 

entities  it  places  in  manifold  relations  to  one  another,  under 
terms  of  "  classes,"  "  laws,"  etc.  Especially  does  it  seek  for, 
and  imagine  that  it  finds,  the  formulas  to  express  the  causal 
action  of  the  beings  which  belong  to  these  different  classes 
and  stand  under  these  different  laws,  one  upon  another,  in 
most  manifold  ways.  If  science  becomes  especially  self-con- 
fident and  enthusiastic,  it  converts  some  of  its  most  abstract 
generalizations  into  primary  realities  and  affirms  an  assured 
knowledge  of  their  inmost  and  unchanging  character.  For 
example :  Energy  may  be  conceived  of  as  an  entity  that  can  be 
stored  and  transferred,  conserved  and  correlated ;  the  law  of 
its  storages  and  transferences,  its  conservation  and  correla- 
tion, may  be  announced  as  having  universal  and  unbroken 
sway  over  things.  This  is,  however,  for  science  only  a  con- 
venient abstraction ;  it  belongs  to  philosophy  to  tell  what  that 
actually  is  can  answer  to  this  term. 

The  right  to  extend  knowledge  in  this  way  —  or,  rather,  the 
right  to  convert  a  system  of  logically  related  conceptions  into 
a  system  of  true  cognitions,  of  judgments  affirming  laws  in 
reality  —  may  well  be  questioned  further  at  this  point.  This 
question  will  lead  us  to  consider,  on  the  one  hand,  the  funda- 
mental and  irrefragable  modes  of  the  functioning  of  intellect, 
and,  on  the  other  hand,  the  criticism  of  those  ontological 
implicates  on  the  basis  of  which  we  identify  the  modes  of 
thought  with  the  modes  of  the  really  existent. 


CHAPTER    IX 

IDENTITY  AND  DIFFERENCE 

THE  sphere  of  experience  is  larger  than  the  sphere  of 
knowledge ;  but  the  sphere  of  knowledge  is  too  large 
to  be  completely  compassed  and,  having  been  mapped  out, 
assigned  in  fee  simple  as  the  domain  of  thinking  faculty  so- 
called.  We  have,  therefore,  narrowed  our  problem  greatly 
'  and  defined  its  limits,  when  for  the  present  we  inquire :  What 
are  the  principles  which  validate  and  explain  —  so  far  as 
validating  and  explanation  are  possible — the  functions  of 
thought  in  all  human  cognition  ?  But  this  inquiry,  as  it  is 
proposed  to  the  serious  student  of  epistemology,  is  something 
very  different  from  the  question  which  logic  may  propound  in 
nearly  the  same  terms.  The  logician's  point  of  view  is  one 
from  which  no  anxiety  need  be  felt  as  to  the  answer  obtained, 
and  at  which  no  insight  is  gained  into  the  deeper,  ontological 
import  of  the  result.  For  what  does  formal  logic  care  as  to 
the  truthfulness  of  thought,  in  the  fundamental  and  incom- 
parably most  important  meaning  of  this  word  ?  Logic  under- 
takes to  show  either  how  men  actually  do  reason,  or  how  they 
may  so  reason  as  to  convince  those  who  hold  by  the  common 
axioms  or  postulates,  —  whether  they  are  sceptics,  dogmatists, 
or  agnostics,  in  their  theory  of  knowledge.  But  epistemology 
must,  by  pushing  its  rights  of  presuppositionless  criticism  to 
their  utmost  possible  limits,  ascertain  what  is  the  final  import 
of  the  first  principles  of  all  thinking,  and  how  far  they  seem 
to  carry  in  themselves,  or  otherwise  to  derive,  their  claim  to 
apply  to  the  trans-subjective. 


IDENTITY  AND  DIFFERENCE  269 

In  the  interests  of  gratifying  that  passion  for  unity  which 
human  reason  so  persistently  displays,  as  well  as  (one  can 
scarcely  fail  to  suspect)  in  the  effort  to  be  original  and  to 
announce  some  startling  new  discovery,  the  principles  of  all 
thinking,  as  these  principles  enter  into  and  conditionate  all 
knowledge,  have  often  been  reduced  to  a  single  formula.  Such 
a  reduction  has,  however,  never  stood  the  test  of  an  appeal  to 
our  actual  cognitive  experience.  At  this  point  let  us  wait  a 
moment  in  reflection  upon  what  the  epistemological  problem 
really  is.  It  is  the  problem  of  the  possibility  of  genuine  cog- 
nition. But  genuine  cognition  is  impossible  without  thinking ; 
it  is  dependent,  therefore,  upon  the  actual  use  of  the  princi- 
ples of  thinking.  The  constitutional  forms  of  the  functioning 
of  human  intellect  are  the  necessary  presuppositions  of  all 
human  cognition.  Yet  again,  cognition  is  not  genuine,  unless 
the  mental  process  terminates  in  an  objective  judgment,  in  a 
form  of  psychic  synthesis  which  carries  with  itself  the  claim 
of  a  valid  trans-subjective  reference.1  To  say,  therefore,  that 
the  possibility  of  actual  cognition  depends  upon  the  truth  of 
cognition  amounts  to  the  claim  that  the  validity  of  all  knowl- 
edge implies  the  right  to  give  to  the  fundamental  principles  of 
human  thinking  a  trans-subjective  reference.  So  far  forth,  the 
principles  of  Reality  not-my-Self  and  the  principles  of  my  think- 
ing must  be  the  same.  The  temptation  is  accordingly  very 
great  to  seize  upon  some  logical  formula  and  convert  it  into 
the  one  all-comprehensive,  all-illumining,  and  all-supporting 
principle  of  both  Self  and  Things.  To  this  temptation  Fichte 
and  Schelling  yielded ;  Hegel  also  in  his  great  work  on  Logic, 
although  in  far  less  complete  and  disastrous  form.  But  the  fact 
and  the  character  of  the  growth  of  knowledge,  through  think- 
ing, itself  demonstrates  that  Reality  is  no  such  simple  affair. 
It  is  not  to  be  thus  summarily  known  as  the  objectification 

1  Nothing  could  well  go  wider  of  the  mark,  or  wound  philosophy  in  a  more 
sensitive  and  fatal  place,  than  the  random  statement  of  Paulsen  ("  Introduction  to 
Philosophy,"  p.  353) :"  No  theory  of  knowledge  causes  the  slightest  change  in 
the  stock  and  value  of  our  knowledge." 


270  IDENTITY  AND  DIFFERENCE 

of  the  logical  principle  of  Identity,  or  of  the  syllogistic  Pro- 
cess by  which  the  human  mind  climbs,  through  stages  of  par- 
tial error  and  half-truth,  to  the  heights  of  the  Idea.  On  the 
other  hand,  we  repeat :  No  explanation  or  validating  of  cog- 
nition is  possible,  except  upon  the  presupposition  that  the 
fundamental  principles  of  my  thinking  are  applicable  to  the 
trans-subjective  Reality. 

Many  centuries  of  reflective  thinking  upon  the  formal  prin- 
ciples of  thought  have  reduced  these  principles  to  two ;  they 
are,  the  "  Principle  of  Identity  and  Non-contradiction,"  and 
the  "  Principle  of  Sufficient  Reason."  This  result  may  well 
enough  be  accepted  as  its  own  warrant.  There  is,  therefore, 
no  one  principle  of  thought  which  can  be  claimed  as  the  only 
source  and  guaranty  of  cognition.  But  there  are  two  princi- 
ples, both  of  which  are  fundamental  (although,  it  may  well  be, 
in  different  ways),  neither  of  which  is  deducible  from  the 
other,  and  both  of  which  must  co-operate,  in  order  that  ob- 
jective cognition  may  result.  Both  of  these  principles  must 
also  somehow  obtain  a  guaranty  for  application  to  the  world 
of  the  really  existent,  both  of  selves  and  of  things,  or  else  all 
human  knowledge  goes  without  explanation,  import,  or  war- 
rant of  any  kind. 

It  has  been  shown  that  thinking,  so  far  as  it  enters  into 
cognition  as  a  necessary  constitutive  factor,  takes  the  form  of 
judging ;  and  that  this  cognitive  judgment  must  itself  be  a 
conscious,  selective,  feeling-full,  and  believing  activity  of  mind. 
It  has  also  been  shown  how,  although  the  greater  part  of 
experience  lies  below  the  threshold  of  consciousness,  and  no 
little  logical  or  formally  correct  elaboration  of  experience  is 
possible  without  the  consciousness  of  the  reasons  which  jus- 
tify it,  yet  so  far  as  growth  of  knowledge  is  itself  to  be  spoken 
of,  such  growth  consists  in  the  conscious,  selective,  feeling- 
full,  and  believing  connection  of  judgments  with  one  another 
as  "  consequents  "  and  "  grounds."  "  I  know  this,"  or  "  This 
is  so  and  so,"  —  such  is  the  intellectual  form  given  to  a  com- 


IDENTITY  AND  DIFFERENCE  271 

pleted  act  of  cognition.  It  is,  therefore,  a  judgment.  "I 
know  this,  because  I  know  that,"  or,  "  This  is  so,  because  that 
is  so,"  —  such  is  the  intellectual  form  of  the  conscious  progress 
from  cognition  to  cognition.  The  knowledge  of  the  connec- 
tion is  itself  a  new  and  most  valuable  cognition.  It  is  called 
reasoning,  or  a  conscious  connecting  of  judgments  with  other 
judgments,  as  finding  in  the  latter  the  supporting  "  reasons  "  or 
so-called  logical  "  grounds  "  of  the  former.  Now  the  "  Prin- 
ciple of  Identity  and  Non-contradiction  "  is  the  necessary  form 
of  every  cognitive  judgment.  And  the  so-called  "  Principle 
of  Sufficient  Reason  "  is  the  necessary  form  of  every  cognitive 
connection  of  judgments,  or  process  of  the  logical  growth  of 
knowledge.  The  rather  must  we  say  that  the  former  is 
nothing  else  than  the  Self's  full  recognition  of  its  own  ut- 
terly presuppositionless  and  inexplicable,  but  unquestionable 
form  of  procedure  in  judging;  and  the  latter  principle  sustains 
the  same  relation  to  the  Self's  procedure  in  all  reasoning.  It 
will  quickly  appear,  however,  that  the  discussion  of  this  prin- 
ciple from  the  point  of  view  of  a  critical  philosophy  of  knowl- 
edge leads  out  into  the  vision  of  that  broader  and  grander 
ontological  discussion  which  metaphysics  and  the  philosophy 
of  religion  require.  How  significant  the  perpetual  recur- 
rence of  this  fact  in  every  topic  assigned  to  the  student  of 
epistemology ! 

It  is  customary  for  treatises  in  Logic  to  throw  the  Principle 
of  Identity  into  some  such  form  as  the  following:  A  is  A', 
and  A  is  not,  and  cannot  possibly  be,  non-A.  This  is  true 
whatever  be  meant  by  A ;  and,  indeed,  whether  any  reality 
be  meant  by  it  or  not.  Now  it  is  at  once  plain  that  this 
principle,  as  thus  stated,  cannot  properly  be  made  a  subject 
of  argument ;  nor  can  it,  strictly  speaking,  be  formally  stated 
without  implying  it  several  times  over  in  the  very  simplest 
form  of  statement.  For  if  I  do  not  hold  fast  to  the  judg- 
ment, or  belief,  —  call  it  what  one  will,  —  that  the  A  of  the 
subject  is  A,  I  cannot  affirm  that  it  is  identical  with  the  A  of 


272  IDENTITY  AND  DIFFERENCE 

the  predicate;  neither  can  I  negate  its  identity  with  the 
non-A  which  forms  the  predicate  when  the  principle  of  non- 
contradiction is  stated.  The  same  thing  is  true  of  the  A  of 
the  predicate.  And  since  in  all  actual  and  earnest  work  of 
judging,  some  definite  relation  between  subject  and  predicate 
is  affirmed  or  denied  by  the  copula,  the  principle  of  identity 
must  be  assumed  as  applicable  in  some  sort  also  to  the  copula. 
But,  further,  if  I  attempt  to  state  my  confidence  in  the  iden- 
tity with  itself  of  either  the  subject-J.  or  the  predicate-.^., 
I  can  only  state  this  confidence  in  the  form  of  a  judgment. 
Thus  subject- A  is  subject-^. ;  and  predicate--^,  is  predicate-A. 
And  now  I  am  ready  to  go  the  whole  thing  over  again  from 
the  very  beginning.  The  principle  of  identity  in  formal  logic 
appears,  then,  to  be  nothing  but  an  abstract  statement  for 
the  presuppositionless  form  of  intellectual  functioning  in 
every  act  of  judgment. 

But  consider,  further,  that  if  this  logical  formula  is  pressed 
to  give  a  full  account  of  its  own  meaning  and  of  its  claims  to 
indisputable  authority,  it  is  speedily  plunged  into  the  most 
distressing  condition  of  doubt.  And  then  critical  episte- 
mology  appears  as  mocking,  with  an  issue  that  leads  to  a  kind 
of  demoniacal  laughter,  her  twin  sister,  formal  and  uncritical 
logic.  This  is  the  fate  which  the  dogmatic  assertion  of  infal- 
libility, even  of  the  most  abstract,  formal,  and  worthless  sort, 
customarily  receives  at  the  hands  of  the  sceptic.  Nor  are  we 
merely  jesting,  or  displaying  an  insane  fondness  for  picking 
flaws  in  the  foundations  of  truth,  when  we  call  attention  to 
the  following  puzzle  :  A  is  not  A,  and  no  A  can  ever  be 
known  as  throughout  =  A.  For  the  A  which  is  the  subject  is 
not  wholly  identical  with  the  A  that  is  the  predicate  ;  it  differs 
from  it,  at  least,  in  being  subject,  whereas  the  latter  is  known 
as  being  predicate.  And  if  I  try  to  affirm  the  complete  iden- 
tity of  the  subject--^,  with  itself,  I  find  myself  hopelessly 
baffled.  For  in  some  respects,  as  first  posited,  it  differs  from 
itself  as  posited  the  second  time ;  and  then,  as  has  already 


IDENTITY    AND  DIFFERENCE  273 

been  seen,  the  positing  of  the  first-posited  subject- A  as  iden- 
tical with  itself,  can  never  be  made  otherwise  than  in  the 
form  of  a  judgment.  And  so  we  have  to  go  over  the  whole 
process  in  confirmation  of  the  principle,  from  the  very  begin- 
ning; but  only  to  end  in  the  same  hard  necessity  at  last. 
Surely,  this  is  a  worse  and  more  hopeless  task  than  that 
given  to  Sisyphus. 

This  crude  mixture  of  sport  and  critical  work  with  the 
principle  of  identity  may  as  well  be  made  at  once  to  teach 
certain  truths  of  no  little  importance.  Criticism  cannot  ex- 
pound, without  implicating  in  the  very  process,  the  presuppo- 
sitionless  principles  of  thinking  itself.  And  it  appears  that 
however  we  may  see  fit  to  express  this  particular  principle,  it 
belongs  to  the  class  of  presuppositionless  principles.  It  ap- 
pears also  that  the  principle  of  identity  is  not  merely  the 
logical  and  formal,  but  the  actual  and  vital,  principle  of  the 
judgment,  as  such  ;  for  when  I  attempt  to  see  how  it  is  that 
I  do  actually,  and  unavoidably,  and,  in  the  fundamentally  most 
necessary  way,  perform  any  act  of  judgment,  I  only  exemplify 
this  principle.  But  when  I  attempt  either  to  expound  or  to 
criticise  the  principle,  I  come  around  to  the  statement  of  it  in 
the  form  of  a  judgment  again.  It  is  itself,  as  stated,  nothing, 
but  the  pure  and  —  as  the  old-fashioned  language  of  philoso- 
phy would  warrant  us  in  saying  —  a  priori  form  of  all  judg- 
ment. But  as  we  prefer  to  express  the  truth  :  The  Principle 
of  Identity  is  only  the  Selfs  recognition  of  its  own  presupposi- 
tionless form  of  mental  life,  when  in  the  act  of  judging. 

On  the  contrary,  however,  it  appears  that  the  term  "  prin- 
ciple of  identity  "  is  not  well  chosen,  if  one  must  understand 
by  identity  a  complete  and  wholly  indistinguishable  sameness. 
Such  identity  as  this  interpretation  of  the  term  implies  con- 
tradicts the  very  nature  of  judgment  itself.  For  differentiation 

—  actually  performed,  as  the  holding  apart  in  consciousness 
of  two  ideas,  or  thoughts,  or  other  momenta  of  the  judgment 

—  is  as  necessary  to  the  actuality  of  any  judgment  as  is  the 

18 


274  IDENTITY  AND  DIFFERENCE 

synthesis  in  which  the  judging  act  consists.  Indeed,  the 
boasted  conception  of  Identity,  as  it  has  been  made  so  much 
use  of,  both  in  the  interests  of  logical  truthfulness  and  in  the 
behalf  of  certain  unintelligible  and  mischievous  ontological 
philosophemes,  is  a  merely  negative  conception.  It  may  be 
said  to  be  the  most  barren  and  negative  of  all  conceptions. 
Even  to  attempt  to  frame  it,  one  has  to  refuse  to  think  at 
all.  Moreover,  as  will  soon  be  shown  with  somewhat  more  of 
detail  (although  the  fuller  exposition  of  this  truth  belongs  to 
metaphysics),  no  real  being  can  possibly  ever  be  known  as 
thus,  strictly  speaking,  self-identical.  For  the  A  of  the  sub- 
ject and  the  A  of  the  predicate,  in  the  formula  of  pure  logic, 
no  reality  can  ever  be  substituted.  Fichte  was  true  to  the 
facts  in  the  case  when  he  posited  Ego  —  Ego,  as  the  original 
and  the  crowning  exemplification  in  experience  of  the  mean- 
ing of  the  principle  of  identity.  But  of  all  examples  which 
could  be  chosen,  the  experience  of  the  Self  in  affirming,  "  I 
am  I,  and  not-you,  and  no  other,"  is  the  best  adapted  to  dis- 
prove the  vulgar  interpretation  of  the  word  "  identity."  Prac- 
tically, too,  the  mind  has  no  interest  in  knowing  that  either 
Selves  or  Things  are  identical  in  any  such  impossible  sense. 
Thus  to  find  the  Self  identical  with  itself,  if  such  finding 
were  not  made  impossible  by  the  very  nature  of  cognition, 
would  be  the  greatest  of  all  misfortunes.  What  we  want  to 
know,  even  of  things,  is  that  we  may  trust  them  (within  cer- 
tain limits  which  can  never  be  strictly  defined  until  the 
knowledge  of  things  is  itself  perfect)  to  behave,  in  their  dif- 
ferent individual  behaviors,  according  to  our  ideas  of  them. 

If,  now,  further  inquiry  be  made  into  the  psychological 
nature  and  origin  of  the  principle  of  identity,  as  it  is  actually 
given  and  as  it  must  be  interpreted  by  the  act  of  thinking 
itself,  it  will  be  seen  that  this  is  equivalent  to  an  inquiry  into 
the  psychological  nature  and  origin  of  cognitive  judgment. 
Sensation-complexes,  ideas,  thoughts,  as  such  and  considered 
abstractly,  are  not  objects  of  knowledge.  In  order  to  convert 


IDENTITY  AND  DIFFERENCE  275 

them,  so  to  speak,  into  objects  of  knowledge,  they  must  get 
recognized  as  belonging  together  in  reality.  Sensation-com- 
plexes, ideas,  thoughts,  as  such  and  considered  abstractly, 
appear  either  similar  or  dissimilar ;  and  it  is  by  a  primal  and 
original  activity  of  discriminating  consciousness  that  we  rec- 
ognize them  as  such  and  thus  judge  them  to  belong  together 
or  apart.  But  the  similar  is  not  the  same,  and  the  dissimilar 
is  not  the  contradictory,  —  in  reality.  In  order  to  call  two 
sensation-complexes,  or  ideas,  or  thoughts,  merely  similar, 
they  must  be  recognized  as  not  the  same ;  the  rather  as  being 
different  in  respect  of  the  time  of  their  occurrence,  or  of  the 
place  to  which  they  are  assigned  in  the  system  of  space  rela- 
tions. On  the  contrary,  two  objects  observed  as  existing  in 
different  times  and  different  relations  of  space  (A  and  A ;  or 
A  and  B :  —  A  here  and  A  there  ;  or  A  now  and  A  then  ;  or 
the  B  here-and-now  that  was  A  then-and-there)  may  be 
known  as  the  same.  In  these  cognitive  processes  the  same 
intellectual  activities  have  been  displayed  in  apprehending 
and  putting  together  the  similar  and  in  recognizing  and  hold- 
ing apart  the  dissimilar ;  but  the  ontological  belief  which 
posits  the  permanent  in  space  and  time  must  be  reckoned 
with  in  giving  account  of  the  origin  and  nature  of  the  judg- 
ment which  terminates  the  intellectual  process.  Identity  or 
sameness,  as  distinguished  from  similarity,  is  the  predicate 
which  cognition  assigns  to  that  which  is  judged  really  to  exist. 
If,  now,  the  principle  of  identity  be  applied  to  our  thinking 
in  a  purely  formal  way,  and  as  a  guaranty  solely  of  the  logi- 
cal correctness  of  thought,  all  the  pith  and  marrow  is  taken 
out  of  the  principle  itself.  In  merely  having  sensations, 
ideas,  thoughts  as  such,  —  if,  indeed,  the  subject  of  conscious- 
ness ever  actually  exists  in  states  of  such  mere  having,  —  no 
application  of  this  principle  is  possible.  As  has  been  clearly 
shown,  it  is  only  in  the  act  of  judging  that  the  principle  of 
identity  is  exemplified  ;  it  is  to  judgments,  as  a  vital  relating 
of  sensations,  ideas,  and  thoughts  that  the  principle  applies. 


276  IDENTITY   AND   DIFFERENCE 

Nor  would  any  conceivable  series  of  mere  sensations,  mere 
ideas,  mere  thoughts,  if  such  series  could  be  carried  on  with- 
out affirmation  or  denial  of  a  connection  between  its  different 
members,  violate  the  principle  of  identity.  I  may  have,  first, 
the  idea  of  a  man  and  then  the  idea  of  quadruped ;  or,  first, 
the  idea  of  an  animal  and  then  the  idea  of  immortal  gods ; 
but  there  is  no  talk  possible  of  logical  correctness  or  real 
truth  in  all  this,  unless  I  attempt  to  judge  some  relation  be- 
tween the  members  of  these  pairs  of  ideas.  If,  however,  I 
have  the  mental  image  of  a  man  and  call  it  quadruped,  or  of 
an  animal  and  call  it  immortal,  then  I  judge.  And  now  it 
may  be  said  that  the  principle  of  identity  has  been  violated, 
because  it  has  been  affirmed  that  man,  a  biped,  is  at  the  same 
time  a  quadruped;  or  that  an  animal,  a  mortal  thing,  is  at 
the  same  time  immortal.  Such  an  exhortation  as  this,  how- 
ever, is  equivalent  to  saying :  "  Do  not  use  words  in  that 
way  ;"  or,  "  Stick  to  your  meaning  through  your  sentence,  at 
least ; "  or,  "  Be  consistent  in  your  affirmations  and  nega- 
tions." In  making  judgments,  one  should  hold  to  the  same 
meaning  for  the  subject,  the  same  meaning  for  the  predicate, 
and  the  same  meaning  for  the  relation  affirmed  by  the  copula 
between  subject  arid  predicate.  Indeed,  one  must  do  so  if 
one  wishes  the  judgment  to  be  true. 

"  One  should,"  and  "  one  must :  "  —  as  to  the  quasi-ethical 
character  of  the  obligation  expressed  by  these  words,  we  shall 
refer  in  another  connection.  But  who  does  not  at  once  dis- 
cover that  exhortations  like  these  are  insignificant  and  even 
absurd,  unless  an  appeal  is  made  to  an  objective  standard  of 
judgment,  to  an  order  of  connections  in  the  reality  known, 
which  is  to  be  followed  in  human,  synthetic  mental  operations  ? 
Why,  indeed,  should  not  all  men  use  words  as  they  please, 
without  holding  fast  to  any  chosen  meanings,  —  affirming 
with  one  breath  what  is  denied  the  next,  or  even  affirming 
and  denying  in  the  coupled  breaths  of  that  conscious  exist- 
ence which  is  needed  for  the  barest  utterance  of  a  single 


IDENTITY  AND  DIFFERENCE  277 

judgment  ?  Indeed,  other  questions  may  be  thrust  yet  deeper 
into  the  centre  of  the  cognizing  soul  of  man  and  into  the  very 
heart  of  Reality.  Why  should  words  have  any  meaning  at 
all ;  and  what  gives  them  the  meaning  they  are  understood  to 
have  ?  Why  should  affirmation  or  denial,  the  very  essence  of 
the  act  of  judging,  be  possible  at  all ;  or,  if  possible,  why 
should  affirmation  and  denial  be  subject  to  any  limitations 
except  those  of  subjective,  momentary,  and  ever  shifting  ca- 
price ?  The  only  answer  that  can  be  given  to  these  inquiries 
restores  its  pith  and  cogency,  as  well  as  its  significance  and 
dignity,  to  the  principle  of  identity.  The  intellect's  standard 
of  judgment  is  not  found  in  the  mere  character  and  sequence 
of  sensations,  ideas,  and  thoughts,  as  such.  Its  standard  of 
judgment  is  objective ;  it  has  reference  to  the  known  nature 
and  relations  of  the  Self  and  Things,  and  of  things  with  one 
another.  The  motif  and  the  goal  of  judgment  is,  therefore,  to 
connect  together  in  the  terms  of  judgment  what  has  been  cog- 
nized as  being  objectively  connected  together.  He  who  does 
this,  correctly  conforming  his  mental  synthesis  to  the  terms 
of  his  objective  experience,  judges  true.  He  who  consciously 
and  intentionally  affirms  that  to  be  connected  which  he  knows 
to  be  not  really  connected,  is  "  a  liar  ;  and  the  truth  is  not  in 
him."  But  he  who,  while  intending  to  conform  his  mental 
synthesis  to  the  connections  of  reality,  unconsciously  and  un- 
intentionally fails  of  this,  is  in  error  ;  the  truth,  formally  con- 
sidered, maybe  "in  him"  but  his  judgment  is,  nevertheless, 
not  true.  Who,  again,  does  not  at  once  discover  that  such 
common  expressions  assume  a  standard  of  judgment  which 
has  reference,  not  only  to  connections  in  reality,  but  also 
to  a  common  nature  for  the  judging  Self? 

If,  then,  the  true  interpretation  of  the  principle  of  identity 
be  accepted  and  consistently  carried  out,  the  differences  rec- 
ognized by  logic  in  the  kinds  of  judgment  do  not  alter  the 
epistemological  significance  or  value  of  the  principle  itself. 
Let,  for  example,  the  distinction  into  judgments  predicating 


278  IDENTITY  AND  DIFFERENCE 

condition  or  action,  those  predicating  a  property,  and  those 
affirming  a  relation,  be  adopted.  Among  relations,  let  those 
of  identity,  of  dependent  connection,  etc.,  be  recognized.  In 
each  of  these  classes,  judgments  designated  as  purely  subjec- 
tive may  be  found  described.  It  is  an  interesting  view  of 
Wundt,1  who  advocates  this  division,  that  the  relating  of  the 
constituents  of  a  judgment  as  conditioning  each  other,  is  one 
of  the  forms  of  the  judgment  of  relation  which  has  gradually 
"  developed,"  in  the  use  of  the  most  abstract  and  universal 
forms  of  thinking,  through  certain  motifs  of  a  scientific  sort. 
We  may  well  doubt  the  application  of  any  theory  of  develop- 
ment to  legitimate,  fundamental  distinctions  in  the  kinds  of 
our  judgments.  But  the  one  epistemological  truth  which  is 
important  here  to  notice  grows  out  of  the  psychological  fact 
that  no  perception  of  the  actions,  properties,  or  relations  of 
things  is  possible  except  in  and  through  developed  activity 
of  thinking  faculty,  terminating  in  cognitive  judgment ;  and 
that,  on  the  other  hand,  thought  and  imagination,  whenever 
they  "  come,  to  judgment"  refer  themselves  back  for  correc- 
tion and  verification  to  the  perception  of  real  things  and  of 
actual  occurrences.  Thus  a  certain  validity  for  reality  (a 
Seinsgultiykeit) 2  belongs  to  the  very  simplest  judgments  as 
well  as  to  the  most  elaborate  and  abstract.  They  all  point  to 
a  trans-subjective  kingdom  of  human  consciousnesses  existing 
in  that  commerce  with  reality  which  is  called  truth,  the 
verifiable  knowledge  of  things,  —  what  they  are,  how  they 
behave,  and  how  they  are  related. 

What,  now,  shall  be  said  of  this  postulated,  or  cognized, 
sameness  of  things,  such  as  seems  necessary  to  make  the 
principle  of  identity  an  accepted  principle  of  cognition  ? 
What  kind  of  sameness,  or  identity,  is  postulated  in  that 
recognition  of  the  principle  of  identity  which  every  cognitive 
judgment  affords  ?  The  more  obvious  answer  to  this  inquiry 

1  System  der  Philosophic,  pp.  56  f. 

2  Compare  Volkelt,  Erfahrung  und  Denken,  pp.  146  f. 


IDENTITY  AND  DIFFERENCE  279 

is  a  negative  answer.  All  we  know  about  any  form  of  reality 
—  selves  or  things,  either  as  active  or  as  passive,  as  possessed 
of  qualities,  properties,  and  attributes,  or  as  standing  in 
manifold  relations  to  each  other  —  shows  us  that  whatever 
identity  realities  have,  is  not  the  equivalent  of  an  inability 
to  change.  Nor,  if  one  wishes  to  convert  an  inability  into 
a  potency,  can  the  identity  of  real  things  be  thought  of  as 
the  equivalent  of  an  ability  not  to  change.  The  rather  are 
the  essential  terms,  on  which  all  cognition  of  things  is  given  to 
the  mind,  such  as  that  it  is  compelled  to  affirm :  "  We  know 
that  things  really  do  change."  On  the  other  hand,  however, 
only  as  some  sort  of  a  limit  is  set  by  things  to  their  own 
changes, .  and  as  this  limit  is  observed  in  the  judgments 
framed  by  the  mind  respecting  them,  can  they  be  known  as 
the  same  things,  in  any  conceivable  meaning  of  the  word 
"  same."  The  guaranty,  therefore,  for  that  application  to 
reality  of  the  principle  of  identity  which  every  cognitive 
judgment  makes,  must  be  found  in  the  nature  of  reality,  of 
its  ability  to  change,  and  yet  to  set  those  limits  to  its  own 
changes  which  shall  enable  it  to  be  known  as  a  system  of 
beings  that  may  be  called  "  the  same." 

The  fuller  meaning  of  this  postulate  as  to  the  nature  of 
Reality,  as  its  nature  is  involved  in  the  nature  of  the  cogni- 
tive judgment,  it  belongs  to  metaphysics  to  unfold.  But 
there  is  a  truth  or  two,  of  a  metaphysical  order,  which  must 
be  stated  in  this  connection  before  the  fuller  meaning  of  the 
previous  epistemological  discussion  can  be  grasped.  To  get 
at  this  truth  we  must  refer  directly  to  the  judgments  which 
express  any  fact  of  knowledge  about  the  Self.  All  my  states 
of  consciousness  — whether  present  and  known  by  immediate 
self-consciousness,  or  past  and  known  by  recognitive  memory, 
or  thought  and  inferred  from  grounds  of  self-consciousness 
and  memory  —  are  known  as  mine ;  that  is,  they  are  referred 
to  one  and  the  same  Self.  But  I  am  no  rigid,  fixed,  and 
ready-made  being,  maintaining  my  identity  by  an  inability  to 


280  IDENTITY  AND  DIFFERENCE 

change,  or  by  an  ability  not  to  change.  On  the  contrary,  I 
am  the  same  being  because  of  that  limitation  to  the  changes 
to  which  I  know  I  am  subject;  and  I  know  myself  as  the 
same  because  all  these  known  changes  are  referable  and 
actually  referred  to  the  one  Self.  Indeed,  the  only  concep- 
tion which  I  can  possibly  form  of  the  identity  of  myself  is 
given  just  in  this  life  of  self-consciousness,  of  recognitive 
memory,  and  of  rational  inference,  which  is  the  sum-total  of 
my  cognition  of  Self.1  And  every  cognitive  judgment  relating 
to  myself,  whatever  form  of  experience  it  embodies  (an 
action,  a  suffering,  a  property  or  capacity,  a  relation),  is  an 
example  under  this  conception. 

But  the  self-identification  which  every  cognitive  .judgment 
having  reference  to  Self  implies  and  enfolds  is  itself  inex- 
tricably interwoven,  as  it  were,  with  a  process  of  discrimina- 
tion ending  in  a  judgment  of  self-differentiation.  Things 
which  are  the  objects  of  my  knowledge,  even  including  my 
bodily  organism,  piece-meal  or  throughout,  are  not  to  be 
identified  with  my  Self.  And  it  needs  only  the  expansion 
of  an  argument  into  which  we  have  entered  at  length  else- 
where, to  show  that  the  theory  of  psychological  parallelism 
with  the  philosophical  doctrine  of  indifference  or  identity 
which  usually  accompanies  it,  involves  the  denial  of  the 
possibility  of  all  knowledge.  Psychologically  considered,  it 
is  out  of  the  differentiation  between  Self  and  Things,  as  an 
indubitable  and  "  lived "  opposition,  that  the  possibility  of 
self-identification  and  of  the  identification  of  things  comes 
forth.  All  the  foundations  of  ordinary  knowledge  and  of 
science  are  undermined  and  nullified  by  the  identification 
of  Self  and  Things.  These  two  realities,  in  the  commerce 
which  is  called  knowledge,  set  limits  to  each  other  such 
as  prevent  their  being  brought  together  under  the  principle 
of  identity.  All  experience  sets  the  limits  over  which  judg- 

1  For  the  detailed  discussion  of  the  subject,  see  "  Philosophy  of  Mind," 
chap.  v. 


IDENTITY  AND  DIFFERENCE  281 

ment  cannot  climb  so  as  to  unite  these  two  in  any  other 
terms  than  those  of  irrational  imagination,  or  wild  fancy, 
rather  than  of  cognitive  judgment. 

Once  more,  however :  What  it  is  for  things  to  be  really 
connected  so  that  our  judgments  about  them  may  be  true, 
may  be  judgments  of  cognition,  —  this  is  something  which 
can  be  known  only  analogically.  How  can  things  change  and 
yet  be  in  any  sort  the  same  —  with  themselves,  or  with  one 
another  as  partaking  of  a  so-called  common  nature  ?  The 
identity  of  other  selves  must  be  conceived  of,  and  is  incon- 
testably  known  as  similar  to  the  identity  of  our  Self.  But  in 
what  does  the  identity  of  things  so  consist  that  they  may 
truly  be  judged  to  be  the  same?  To  this  question  no  reply 
can  be  given  which  does  not  draw,  for  its  positive  and  com- 
prehensible meaning,  upon  our  experience  with  the  Self.  But 
this  "I  know"  to  which  all  our  theory  of  cognition  constantly 
refers  backward,  when  having  for  its  object  ourself,  has  been 
found  to  be  no  rigid  unchanging,  and  once  for  all  ready-made 
affair.  The  Self  is  a  life  conformable  to  law,  and  maintaining 
its  identity  by  this  conformity.  Not  as  though,  indeed,  law 
were  itself  some  rigid  and  ready-made  entity,  that  rules  over 
the  Self  as  the  inflexible  walls  of  the  prison-cell  control  the 
prisoner.  For  knowledge  can  grow  ;  or  rather,  I  can  grow 
in  knowledge  and  in  all  the  fulness  of  that  life  which  belongs 
to  a  Self.  I  seem,  then,  to  be  really  one  and  the  same,  and 
thus  both  self-identified  and  differentiated  from  other  things, 
because  the  series  of  my  changes  follows  the  ordering  of  im- 
manent ideas.  Shall  we  say,  then,  that  judgments  affirming 
the  identity  and  the  differentiations  of  things  can  be  true 
only  if  the  being  of  things  is  like  this  self-known  being  of 
ours  ? 

The  principle  of  identity,  subjectively  considered,  is  but  the 
life  of  the  intellect  following  its  fundamental  law ;  and  thus 
trying  to  put  together  in  judgment  what  belongs  together  in 
reality,  and  to  separate  in  judgment  what  belongs  apart  in 


282  IDENTITY  AND  DIFFERENCE 

reality.  But  if  such  an  act  of  intellect  can  give  truth,  if  the 
forms  of  mental  combining  and  separating  can  be  genuinely 
cognitive  and  representative  of  reality,  then  it  would  seem 
that  the  constitution  of  Reality  must  be,  in  important  ways, 
similar  to  that  of  the  Self.  Here,  again,  we  come  upon  a 
thought  which  has  occupied  us  already  and  to  which  we  shall 
return  again.  It  is  the  thought  crudely  expressed  in  the 
ancient  saying  of  Chwang-Tsze  :  — 

"  The  Tao  is  always  One,  and  yet  it  requires  change." 


CHAPTER   X 

SUFFICIENT  REASON 

'"T^HOSE  simpler  connections  of  the  different  items  of  our 
-*-  experience  which  are  affirmed  in  the  more  obviously 
true  judgments  of  cognition  are  a  small  part  of  the  entire  body 
of  knowledge  even  as  developed  by  the  individual  mind.  But 
the  entire  body  of  knowledge  to  which  the  spirit  of  inquiry  in 
the  race  has  given  life  and  growth  is  much  more  a  matter  of 
correct  and  complicated  reasonings  from  so-called  "  premises  " 
or  "  grounds."  Scientific  knowledge  is  pre-eminently  con- 
ceptual ;  for  it  is  given  in  that  kind  of  intellectual  function- 
ing which  sees  the  universal  in  the  particular;  and  then, 
having  seized  upon  the  principle,  or  rule,  explains  and  anti- 
cipates the  particular  by  connecting  it  with  the  universal. 
The  students  of  the  physical  sciences,  by  the  modern  methods 
and  in  the  modern  spirit,  sometimes  boast  of  their  devotion  to 
those  facts  which  the  intuitions  of  the  senses  can  disclose 
only  to  the  trained  observer.  This  they  occasionally  do  as 
though  reasoning  and  perception  were  opposed  as  are  the 
grounds  of  error  to  the  sources  of  truth.  But  every  student 
of  the  psychology  and  philosophy  of  knowledge  knows  that 
what  is  called  the  "  science  "  of  external  things  is  nothing 
but  a  system  of  more  or  less  consistent  abstractions,  devised 
for  purposes  of  practical  or  intellectual  mastery,  in  depend- 
ence upon  favorite  points  of  view.  These  points  of  view  are 
often  rather  arbitrarily  selected  and  rapidly  shifting.  Is  the 
Reality  such  as  to  be  represented  in  this  way  ?  And  what 
postulate  is  needed  in  order  to  save  the  whole  structure  of 


284  SUFFICIENT  REASON 

modern  science  from  being  perpetually  imprisoned  in  the 
"  death-kingdom  "  of  abstract  thoughts  ? 

Now  it  is  evident  that  whoever  thinks  with  a  view  to  know, 
and  ends  by  believing  that  he  has  thought  so  as  to  attain 
knowledge  actually  makes  the  coveted  postulate.  For  in 
spite  of  its  dislike  to  consider  theories  of  knowledge  or  meta- 
physical assumptions  as,  of  inalienable  right,  seated  in  its 
own  realm,  physical  science  is  science  only  as  it  has  already 
come  to  unconsciously  accepted  terms  with  these  theories 
and  assumptions.  It  aims,  of  course,  to  hit  reality  by  its 
conceptions ;  and  by  its  judgments  respecting  causes  and 
laws,  when  seriously  determined  and  gravely  pronounced,  to 
express  the  reciprocal  relations  of  the  really  existent.  If 
scientific  conceptions  and  judgments  do  not  aim  at  this,  they 
are  of  little  real  value  from  any  point  of  view.  And  if  they 
do  not  sometimes  hit  the  mark  at  which  they  are  constantly 
bound  to  aim,  then  all  scientific  conceptions  and  judgments 
are  nothing  better,  from  the  epistemological  point  of  view, 
than  dreams  or  other  forms  of  illusion. 

The  naive  theory  of  knowledge,  or  epistemological  postulate, 
which  underlies  the  claims  of  science  to  be  something  more 
than  dreams,  to  be  indeed  a  system  of  cognitions,  however 
fragmentary  and  incomplete,  is  neither  far  to  seek  nor  hard 
to  find.  So  far  as  concerns  our  present  purpose,  it  is  simply 
this :  By  reasoning  from  known  facts  of  perception  one  may 
reach  known  truths  of  a  more  or  less  general  applicability. 
Knowledge  may  be  gained  by  ratiocination,  if  only  one  will 
start  from  knowledge  and  pursue  the  course  of  ratioci- 
nation in  proper  form.  But,  subjectively  considered,  the 
"  proper  form  "  of  reasoning  is  that  which  the  very  constitu- 
tion of  the  intellect  sets  to  itself.  So  that,  in  order  to  reach 
the  truth  of  things  by  reasoning,  some  sort  of  a  metaphysical 
assumption  must  be  added  to  the  epistemological  postulate. 
The  nature  of  this  assumption  is  so  hidden,  and  its  possible 
sweep  in  application  so  far-reaching,  that  one  may  well  hesi- 


SUFFICIENT  REASON  285 

tate  before  the  problem  of  giving  it  expression.  Its  final  and 
fullest  expression  is  very  far  to  seek  and  very  hard  to  find. 
Enough  of  it,  however,  may  be  brought  to  the  surface  at  once, 
to  show  how  it  is  that,  by  the  subjective  processes  of  his  own 
intellect,  man  may  follow,  discover,  and  prove  the  changing 
relations  of  the  really  existent  world  of  things. 

[As  to  the  nature  of  the  reasoning  process,  an  important 
train  of  considerations  may  be  introduced  in  the  following 
way.  Students  of  the  development  of  mental  life  in  children 
mark  a  notable  change,  which  comes  on  either  by  stages  that 
cannot  be  readily  traced  or  by  more  sudden  leaps,  and  which 
concerns  the  connections  established  between  the  different 
portions  of  the  stream  of  consciousness.  [Discontinuity,  lack 
of  established  relations  of  any  description,  a  kind  of  lawless- 
ness, characterizes  the  earlier  psychoses  of  the  human  animal./ 
The  first  signs  of  continuity,  the  earlier  relations  established 
so  as  to  bring  some  sort  of  order  out  of  this  original  hetero- 
geneity, are  not  of  a  predominatingly  intellectual  kind.  ^Mind 
is  undoubtedly  active  from  the  beginning  ;  for  the  conception 
of  a  purely  passive  or  receptive  consciousness  is  unpsycholog- 
ical  and  even  absurd.  Discriminating  consciousness  is  neces- 
sary even  in  order  to  have  state  distinguished  from  state,  in 
the  flowing  stream  of  conscious  life.  But,  at  first,  the  connec- 
tions of  the  factors  which  fuse  into  the  more  complex  states, 
and  the  connections  of  the  states  with  one  another  in  the 
series  of  states,  are,  as  it  were,  dictated  from  without  by  the 
character  and  successions  of  the  stimuli  which  arouse  sensa- 
tions, volitions,  and  their  motor  accompaniments,  and  the 
"  cohort  of  attendant  ideas."  The  next  following  connections 
are  chiefly  such  as  emphasize  the  principle  of  "  contiguity  in 
consciousness,"  in  its  power  over  the  primary  associations 
of  the  ideas ;  thought  is  now  chiefly  active  in  the  fuller 
perception  of  the  content  of  the  mental  life  by  virtue  of 
established  points  for  the  recognition  of  resemblances  and 
differences. 


286  SUFFICIENT  REASON 

In  the  progressive  organizing  of  experience,  conformity  of 
the  subjective  connections  to  law  (something  other  than  mere 
generalized  fact  of  established  associations  of  the  ideas)  is  the 
notable  change  to  which  reference  was  made  above.  Estab- 
lished "  objective  connection  "  is  another  term  which  may  help- 
fully be  employed  for  this  change.  Because  it  has  already 
passed  one  judgment  connecting  its  sensation-complexes, 
ideas,  and  thoughts  in  a  certain  way,  the  Self  finds  itself 
bound  to  pass  one  or  more  other  judgments  also  connecting 
its  sensation-complexes,  ideas,  thoughts,  in  a  certain  definite 
way.  As  yet  it  may  not  be  that  we  consciously  reason :  If 
A  is  S,  then  O  is  D ;  or  that  we  consciously  point  out  to 
ourselves  why  the  judgment  C-is-D  should  follow  in  con- 
sciousness upon  the  judgment  A-\s-B.  Let  it  suffice  that  the 
connection  between  two  judgments  is  simply  noticed  ;  when 
one  is  made,  the  other  is  observed  to  follow  as  a  matter 
of  fact.  This  compulsion  the  mind  comes  to  regard  as  a 
privilege  ;  for  in  it  lies  all  the  mind's  power  of  explanation, 
and  all  its  right  to  expect,  to  plan,  to  act,  indeed  to  live 
rationally  at  all. 

Further  development  in  the  same  direction  of  the  conscious 
life  of  the  intellect  consists  in  the  more  and  more  complicated 
and  yet,  on  the  whole,  firmer  establishment  of  connections  of 
similar  kind ;  but,  especially,  perhaps,  in  increase  of  insight 
into  the  number  and  character  of  the  terms  which  mediate 
between  the  different  judgments  already  connected  in  fact. 
Some  of  the  earlier  connections  —  not  a  few  of  them  among 
the  most  favorably  considered  and  highly  prized  —  become 
broken  up.  But  many  new  connections  are  formed.  Some  — 
and  these  among  the  most  valuable  for  the  life  of  conduct  and 
of  artistic  endeavor  —  drop  almost  or  quite  out  of  conscious- 
ness ;  but  only  because  they  have  become  incorporated 
into  the  bodily  mechanism  and  into  all  the  hidden  and  fun- 
damental structure  of  the  mental  life.  It  may  be  said  of 
such  connections  of  psychoses  that  they  are  the  "acquired 


SUFFICIENT  REASON  287 

constitution "    for    the    individual    mind    in    its    particular 
environment. 

(But  as  a  matter  of  fact,  reasoning  is  not  understood  to  be, 
ancl  it  is  not,  a  blind,  compulsory,  or  unconscious  connection 
of  judgment  with  other  judgment,  however  firm  in  actual  se- 
quence the  connection  may  be.  The  whole  of  our  conscious- 
ness as  we  find  it  when  we  find  ourselves  already  reasoning, 
or  consciously  coupling  judgments  firmly  together,  is  not 
faithfully  formulated  by  saying  simply  :  "  In  the  stream  of 
consciousness  I  find  A  is  judged  to  be  B  ;  and  then  (in  the 
temporal  meaning  of  the  word)  O  is  judged  to  be  D."  The 
rather  must  the  formula  to  express  this  experience  run  as 
follows :  "  I  know  that  C  is  Z>,  because  I  know  that  A  is  B" 
And  the  more  one's  system  of  cognitive  judgments  has  been 
made  consistent  and  carried  onward  toward  the  ideal  of 
higher  cognition,  the  more  ready  is  one  apt  to  be  with  an 
answer  to  the  further  question,  as  to  why  any  one  judgment  is 
made  dependent  upon  another.  This  consciousness  of  "  the 
Why  "  is  the  development  of  our  knowledge  through  mediate 
terms.  When,  then,  we  come  to  the  consciousness  of  the  en- 
tire process  which  gives  to  the  mind  the  satisfaction  it  feels  in 
the  judgment  (7  is  Z>,  as  a  truly  cognitive  judgment,  and  not 
merely  as  a  product  of  imagination  or  of  abstract  thinking, 
we  find  this  process  depends  upon  a  mediating  judgment 
which  may  be  expressed :  B  is  G.  And  now  the  completed 
act  of  reasoning,  as  justified  in  a  terminal  judgment  of  cog- 
nition, stands  before  us:  If — as  I  know — A  is  B,  then  — 
as  I  conclude  —  0  is  D ;  because  —  as  I  know —  B  is  C.  It 
is  this  principle,  which  enters  into  all  acts  of  reasoning,  if 
they  are  to  result  in  the  extension  of  knowledge,  that,  when 
the  full  meaning  of  these  acts  is  understood,  is  called  "  the 
principle  of  sufficient  reason." 

The  moment,  however,  the  significance  of  such  a  procedure 
on  the  part  of  intellect  is  brought  to  the  vital  test  of  actual 
experience,  it  becomes  evident  that  the  procedure  itself  can- 


288  SUFFICIENT   REASON 

not  be  explained  as  a  merely  logical  and  formal  affair.  Here 
is  not  a  simple  case  of  intellect  functioning  under  the  laws  of 
its  own  objective  activity,  and  so  making  these  laws  objective, 
because  it  cannot  function  otherwise  than  according  to  these 
same  laws.  It  is  not  solely  by  conformity  to  any  intellectual 
law,  whether  of  its  own  voluntary  assumption  or  imposed 
from  some  unknown  outside  source,  that  acts  of  cognitive 
ratiocination  are  either  tested  or  explained.  Kant,  indeed, 
endeavored  to  show  that  the  secret  of  the  cogency  which  the 
act  of  transcendental  judgment  (the  rather,  as  Schopenhauer 
correctly  affirms,  should  he  have  said,  the  objective  reference 
of  the  act  of  reasoning)  has,  is  to  be  found  in  the  facts  of 
sequence  according  to  a  rule.1  This  was,  perhaps,  the  most 
pitiful  failure  in  all  the  "  Critique  of  Pure  Reason ; "  and  the 
failure  was  the  more  surprising  because,  as  Kant  himself  has 
assured  us,  it  was  Hume's  sceptical  analysis  of  the  idea  of 
causality  which  aroused  him  from  his  "  dogmatic  slumber " 
and  stimulated  him  to  the  task  of  criticising  thoroughly  all 
human  cognition. 

Something  far  other  than  mere  conscious  conformity  to  a 
fixed  order  of  objective  ideas  in  time  must  be  recognized  in 
our  account  of  the  origin,  nature,  and  significance  of  the 
principle  of  sufficient  reason.  The  psychology  of  the  subject, 
if  it  had  been  profoundly  considered  and  faithfully  inter- 
preted, would  have  led  Kant  to  see  the  unsatisfactory  char- 
acter of  his  position  as  taken  in  the  passage  of  the  Critique 
to  which  reference  has  just  been  made.  For  the  wonderful 
difference  of  the  results  for  cognition  between  the  connec- 
tions of  my  ideas,  when  I  perceive  the  successive  portions  of 
an  object  known  by  the  senses,  and  when  I  reason  my  way 
to  a  conclusion  as  to  the  causal  relations  of  things,  depends 
mainly  upon  the  difference  sustained  by  the  two  trains  of 
ideation  to  the  activity  of  my  will.  This  psychological  truth 
is,  indeed,  hinted  at  and  even  recognized  by  Kant.  I  can 

1  Transcendental  Analytic,  Second  Analogy. 


SUFFICIENT  REASON  289 

determine  by  an  act  of  will  the  order  in  which  I  perceive  the 
successive  parts  of  the  building  over  yonder,  whether  from 
upper  right-hand  to  lower  left-hand  corner,  or  across  and 
upward,  or  the  reverse,  or  any  other  order,  to  suit  my  con- 
venience or  according  to  my  subjective  habits  of  perception. 
But  I  cannot  determine  by  an  act  of  will  the  order  of  the 
successive  places  in  which  the  sailing-vessel,  off  there,  shall 
appear  in  the  stream  or  on  the  horizon  of  the  sea.  The  order 
of  the  successive  portions  of  the  building  may  be  perceived 
as  either  A,  B,  (7,  />,  to  N;  or  as  N  through  D,  (7,  B,  to  A  ; 
or,  possibly  as  J9,  (7,  B,  A,  and  then  from  D  to  N,  or  -ZVto  D. 
Yet  the  statical  relations  of  space  between  A  and  B,  0  and  Z>, 
etc.,  remain,  in  the  resulting  perceptive  judgment,  independ- 
ent in  reality,  of  my  will.  And  I  sum  up  my  different  expe- 
riences with  the  changing  orders  of  the  portions  successively 
perceived,  in  the  form  of  a  judgment  affirming  a  fixed  and 
unchanging  order  of  these  portions  in  the  totality  of  the 
perceived  object. 

The  different  portions  of  the  same  building,  so  long  as  they 
remain  related  without  obvious  change,  are  not  ordinarily 
thought  of  as  doing  anything  to  each  other.  If,  now,  I  choose 
to  change  my  point  of  view,  I  may  at  once  think  of  them  as 
sustaining  very  important  reciprocal  relations,  which  call 
them  into  unceasing  activity,  each  in  dependence  upon  the 
other.  Indeed,  from  certain  points  of  view,  I  must  think  of 
them  in  this  way.  From  below  upward,  A  is  "  sustaining " 
B,  and  B  is  "  sustaining "  C,  and  so  on ;  but  from  above 
downward,  D  is  "  pressing  "  down  on  (7,  and  C  on  B,  and  so 
on.  Or,  enumerating  sideways,  B  is  "  binding  "  together  A 
and  (7;  or  this  same  B  must  also  be  thought  of  as  "  separat- 
ing "  its  contiguous  portions  on  either  hand.  The  words 
"  binding "  and  "  separating  "  may  be  used  in  two  senses, 
however,  one  of  which  coincides  with  the  sense  which  is  given 
to  the  words  "  sustaining,"  or  "  holding  up,"  and  "  pressing 

down."     To  illustrate  this,  let  us  suppose  that  the  order  of 

19 


290  SUFFICIENT  REASON 

the  different  portions  of  the  building  is  being  perceived  as 
A,  B,  (7,  etc.,  up  and  down.  That  B  must  exist  between  A 
and  0  and  bind  these  two  together,  whether  the  order  of 
their  existence  be  read  off  from  A  to  (7  upward  or  from  C  to 
A  downward,  is  a  necessity  which  my  intellect  recognizes  as 
belonging  to  all  material  reality,  since  it  is  always  known  to 
be  extended  in  space  and  capable  of  being  made  the  subject 
of  successive  perceptive  acts  in  time.  In  this  meaning  of  the 
words',  "  binding  "  and  "  separating  "  are  services  necessarily 
to  be  performed  by  B  for  A  and  (7,  even  if  all  three  members 
of  the  series  stand  in  the  same  order  as  stones  across  the 
building  rather  than  as  the  same  stones  laid  up  and  down. 
Now  suppose,  however,  that  while  getting  a  knowledge  of  this 
building  by  sense-perception,  I  miss  from  its  place  a  certain 
large  stone,  B,  which  does  not  stand  in  its  proper  position 
between  A  and  (7,  but  has  been  dislodged  from  that  position 
and  is  lying  on  the  ground.  If  I  confine  my  reasoning 
strictly  to  the  conclusions  following  from  the  sensuous  shock 
of  missing  B  from  the  order  A,  B,  C,  etc.,  when  read  off  in 
lateral  direction,  I  find  this  process  results  in  a  terminal 
judgment  of  no  new  or  startling  kind.  If  B  appears  as 
empty  space,  or  is  known  to  be  only  air,  it  will  serve  as  well 
as  would  a  stone  to  bind  and  to  separate  between  A  and  (7, 
as  long  as  the  series  is  thought  of  as  holding  in  reality, 
under  the  conditions  merely  of  Time  and  of  Space. 

But  the  sensuous  shock  which  follows  my  missing  B  from 
its  place  in  the  series  of  successive  portions  of  a  building  of 
stone  read  from  A,  B,  C,  D,  up  to  N,  would  undoubtedly  lead 
to  reasoning  that  falls  under  a  quite  different  rubric,  and  that 
terminates  in  a  cognitive  judgment  of  a  quite  different  signi- 
ficance and  value.  To  bring  this  into  clearer  light  for  our 
recognition,  let  it  be  supposed  that  the  same  real  building  is 
being  inspected  in  vertical  direction,  and  that  attention  is 
directed  to  the  importance  of  having  the  order  complete  in  this 
direction.  And  now  we  cannot  spare  B  from  its  place  between 


SUFFICIENT  REASON  291 

A  and  (7;  to  miss  it  shocks  something  more  than  the  smooth 
flow  of  the  objective  series  regarded  as  determined  by  the  in- 
tellectual functions  of  perception,  under  the  formal  and  purely 
a  priori  presuppositions  of  space  and  time.  Now  there  are 
real  interests  at  stake  which  cannot  be  conserved  by  logical 
formulas  or  by  an  elaborate  display  of  the  immanent  principles 
of  "pure  understanding."  Other  trowels  than  those  which 
carry  the  cement  of  a  syllogistic  process,  regardless  of  concrete 
realities,  are  now  needed.  Epistemological  architectonic 
which  relies  upon  an  analysis  of  understanding,  in  a  merely 
formal  way,  to  secure  the  safety  of  cognition's  structure  will 
scarcely  serve  the  purposes  of  the  present  demand  for  a  con- 
nection between  the  successive  portions  of  this  experience. 
For  all  men  believe  that,  in  reality,  B  has  been  doing  another 
kind  of  "  binding  "  and  "  separating  "  between  A  and  O.  Empty 
space,  or  thin  air,  will  not  suffice  for  this  kind  of  binding  and 
separating. 

Or,  to  make  yet  clearer  the  necessity  for  something  more 
than  the  recognition  of  a  sequence  of  ideas  that  our  will  cannot 
determine,  and  that  is  merely  the  objectification,  as  it  were, 
of  the  a  priori  forms  of  intellectual  functioning,  let  a  yet  more 
violent  supposition  be  made.  Let  it  be  supposed  that  the 
object  of  perception  is  a  long  steel  girder,  which  appears 
stretched  from  one  massive  wall  to  the  other  of  a  building. 
The  business  of  the  beholder  is  inspection,  — a  business  concern- 
ing most  important  real  interests,  and  not  a  dilettante  affair  of 
formal  logic  or  theory  of  knowledge.  The  agents  in  the  busi- 
ness, or  parties  to  the  controversy,  are  mechanical  engineers 
who  are  learned  respecting  the  strength  of  materials,  the  me- 
chanics of  the  girder,  and  other  similar  physical  affairs,  rather 
than  experts  in  the  psychology  and  philosophy  of  cognition. 
Under  these  circumstances  it  is  difficult  to  exaggerate  the 
intensity  of  the  shock  which  would  be  experienced  on  discov- 
ering that  so  important  a  support  of  the  building  was  inter- 
rupted at  some  place,  for  a  distance  corresponding  to  B  (we 


292  SUFFICIENT  REASON 

will  say,  for  four  feet  between  A  and  (7).1  Lo !  a  piece  of 
matter,  straight  and  faithful  to  its  important  function  of  sup- 
porting an  enormous  strain  without  sagging,  and  yet  with  one 
portion  entirely  gone.  To  see  this,  who  would  trust  his  eyes, 
even  if  after  repeated  rubbings  they  continued  to  bear  witness 
to  so  great  a  miracle  ?  This  kind  of  a  shock,  however,  cannot 
be  explained  as  a  purely  nervous  affair.  Nor  can  the  trains 
of  reasoning  which  it  sets  in  motion  and  directs  for  the  selec- 
tion of  their  major  and  minor  premises  be  dealt  with,  so  long 
as  we  continue  to  maintain  for  their  explanation  the  merely 
formal  points  of  view.  Its  nervus  prolandi  is  neither  merely 
physiological,  nor  psycho-physical,  nor  purely  an  intellectual 
affair.  The  rather  is  it  an  affair  which  requires  all  the  ele- 
ments of  the  growth  of  cognition,  as  a  system  of  interconnected 
cognitive  judgments,  to  be  taken  into  the  account. 

In  the  case  just  supposed,  the  inspectors  of  the  building 
were  appointed  for  the  purpose  of  forming,  by  use  of  the  senses 
in  perception,  a  rational  judgment  that  should  affirm  or  deny 
its  proper  and  safe  construction.  The  successive  items  of 
their  cognition  gained  by  perception  all  involve  thinking  on 
the  basis  of  previous  experience  with  things  as  existing  under 
conditions  of  space  and  time ;  and  they  all  terminate  in  cogni- 
tive judgments  affirming  real  connections  of  the  same  things 
in  space  and  time.  Inasmuch,  however,  as  this  particular 
structure  is  being  examined  with  a  view  to  determine  some- 
thing quite  different  from  its  conformity  to  the  a  priori  rules 
of  time  and  space,  all  judgments  respecting  it  take  a  turn  ap- 
propriate to  this  end ;  the  processes  of  reasoning  which  are 
started  and  followed  move  along  lines  fixed  by  a  peculiar  class 
of  conceptions;  and  the  terminal  judgment  is  of  a  special 
order  in  respect  of  its  origin,  its  significance,  and  its  value. 

1  It  was  once  my  privilege  to  hear  a  vivid  and  detailed  description  of  the  feel- 
ings, thoughts,  and  actions  of  an  architect  who,  while  inspecting  a  building,  saw 
the  supports  of  the  floor  above  his  head  in  the  cellar  visibly  yielding  to  their  load. 
The  description  was  an  excellent  study  for  a  theory  in  the  psychology  and 
philosophy  of  knowledge. 


SUFFICIENT  REASON  293 

Now  we  contend  without  hesitation  that  all  which  chiefly  in- 
terests the  mind  in  the  explanation  of  such  a  transaction  as 
this  is  totally  unaccounted  for  by  Kant's  doctrine  of  the  three 
"  Analogies  of  Experience."  "  All  phenomena,"  says  he,  "  so 
far  as  their  existence  is  concerned,  stand  a  priori  under  rules 
which  determine  their  relation  to  one  another,  in  one  and  the 
same  time."  l  As  to  Kant's  inadequate  and  lifeless  account 
of  the  principle  of  identity  (Analogy  A),  when  applied  to  ob- 
jects of  experience  (his  realitatis  phcenomena)  nothing  further 
need  be  said.  But  his  account  of  the  nature  and  grounds  of 
rational  judgment,  as  applied  to  the  cognition  of  things  in 
relation,  is  even  more  inadequate  and  lifeless.  This  is  be- 
cause it  is  our  apprehension  of  causes,  and  of  the  reciprocally 
determining  conditions  of  things  which  constitutes  the  ade- 
quate and  living  picture  of  reality  that  genuine  cognition 
gives.  When,  then,  one  is  told  that  "all  changes  happen 
according  to  the  law  of  the  connection  of  cause  and  effect," 
one  seems  to  listen  with  a  kind  of  approbation  which  is, 
after  all,  only  a  state  of  expectation,  to  familiar  but  as  yet 
unmeaning  words.  But  when  one  is  further  told  that  the 
meaning  of  these  words,  "  being  connected  as  cause  and 
effect,"  is  this :  "  All  that  happens  (begins  to  be)  presup- 
poses something  on  which  it  follows  according  to  a  rule," 
one's  disappointment  at  the  shallowness  of  the  analysis  breaks 
all  bounds.  For  here  what  is  secondary  takes  the  place,  in 
explanation,  of  what  is  primary  ;  the  regularity  of  the  sequence 
in  connection  is  made  to  assume  the  character  of  a  potency 
that  shall  produce  the  sequence  itself.  And  when  Kant,  in 
his  following  treatment  of  the  Third  Analogy,  introduces  the 
same  problem  in  yet  more  expressive  terms,  and  declares  that 
the  whole  world  of  cognized  objects  is  bound  together  by 
rational  judgment  under  the  presupposition  that  "All  sub- 
stances, so  far  as  they  can  be  simultaneously  perceived,  are 
in  complete  reciprocal  interaction  (in  durchgangiger  Wechsel- 

1  Heading  of  the  section  in  the  first  edition. 


294  SUFFICIENT  KEASON 

wirkung) ;  and  then  proceeds  to  overlook  the  plainest  meaning 
and  most  obvious  implications  of  his  own  terms,  in  the  inter- 
ests of  architectonic  formalism  and  pre-established  agnosticism, 
his  most  devoted  admirer  is  tempted  to  accuse  him  of  an  un- 
ethical juggling  with  words.1 

To  recur  to  our  illustration  of  the  nature  and  validity  of 
cognitive  reasoning  once  more :  let  us  consider  further  that 
second  meaning  of  the  words  "  binding "  and  "  separating " 
which,  it  was  said,  coincides  with  the  meaning  of  the  words 
"  supporting"  and  "  pressing"  down.  The  mere  grammatical 
significance  of  the  fact  that  all  four  words  have  the  same  form 
of  ending  (-ing)  is  not  without  its  suggestions  of  a  fundamental 
truth.  This  ending  is  verbal  and  signifies  that  the  forms  of 
predicating  designated  by  the  roots  —  bind,  separate,  support, 

1  As  Adickes  says,  the  Third  Analogy  discusses  the  problem  of  causality,  and  is, 
in  a  special  manner,  "  the  focus  of  the  entire  Kritik."  It  does  not,  however, 
grapple  with  this  problem  in  any  such  way  as  either  to  explain  our  experience 
psychologically  or  to  satisfy  our  epistemological  inquiries.  It  is  even  less  success- 
ful, because  more  remote  from  actual  life,  than  was  the  explanation  of  the  scepti- 
cal critic  criticised  by  Kant,  —  namely,  David  Hume.  In  general,  there  is  scarcely 
anything,  in  the  line  of  theoretical  discussions,  more  incouclusive  and  wearisome 
than  what  is  current  on  the  subject  of  causality.  Physicists  and  psychologists 
both  know  perfectly  well  what  men  really  mean  when  they  naively,  and  without 
prejudice,  talk  of  causes  and  effects.  All  men  think  of  things  as  doing  something 
to  each  other,  and  as  having  something  done  to  them  ;  and  of  themselves  as  doing 
something  to  things.  Less  popularly  expressed,  everybody  believes  and  must 
believe,  that  both  things  and  minds  are  real ;  that  both  things  and  minds  are 
active ;  and  that  both  have  the  forms  of  their  activity  conditioned,  in  a  limited  way, 
upon  the  activity  of  other  minds  and  other  things.  The  "  laws  "  which  science 
discovers  and  announces  are  nothing  but  the  known  or  conjectured,  more  or  less 
uniform,  modes  of  the  behavior  of  minds  and  things  in  their  changing  relations 
to  each  other.  But  let  once  some  precious  theory  —  like  that  of  the  conservation 
and  correlation  of  a  fixed  quantity  of  an  entity  called  "  Force,"  or  the  psycho- 
physical  parallelism  which,  as  a  revived  form  of  Spinozism,  many  psychologists 
have  taken  quite  off  its  metaphysical  base,  in  the  attempt  to  defend  it  experimen- 
tally —  be  imperilled,  and  this  belief,  at  once  "  common-sense,"  scientifically 
defensible  and  philosophically  sound,  deserts  them.  They  begin,  as  professed 
experts,  to  deal  with  mere  abstractions  and  empty  formulas;  as  though  these 
could  account  for  anything,  least  of  all  for  the  reasoning  processes  which  deal  with 
them.  And  yet  their  very  theories,  thus  falsely  or  inadequately  conceived,  sprang 
from  no  other  source  than  that  very  experience  the  validity  of  which  the  theories 
would  deny. 


SUFFICIENT  REASON  295 

and  press  —  are  applied  to  things  because  the  things  them- 
selves are  conceived  of  as  in  action.  The  words  express  the 
mind's  conceptions  of  the  peculiar  and  appropriate  mode  of 
that  action  of  the  being,  A,  or  B,  or  (7,  to  which  the  words  are 
applied.  But  the  series  of  judgments  employed  in  such  mental 
acts  of  reasoning  relates  to  more  than  one  object  of  cognition ; 
for  what  is  affirmed  is  not  simply  that  B  is  "  binding "  and 
"separating,"  or  "  supporting,"  or  "pressing"  down,  —  in 
loneliness  of  being,  as  a  single  Thing,  isolated  from  all  environ- 
ment of  other  beings.  But  B  is  binding  and  separating  between 
A  and  (7;  or  it  is  supporting  O  and  is  itself  pressing  down  on 
A.  Nor  could  we  conceive  of  B  as  binding  and  separating 
between  A  and  (7,  unless  both  A  and  0  were  conceived  of  as 
at  the  same  time  pulling  apart,  or  pressing  together.  If,  too, 
B  supports  (7,  it  is  itself  being  pressed  upon  by  C;  and, 
in  turn,  it  is  pressing  down  upon  A  ;  but  only  with  the 
understanding  that  it  is  to  be  supported  by  A.  All  this  is 
popularly  and  naively  expressed  by  such  phrases  as  accuse 
things  of  acting  "  upon  "  each  other,  or  of  "  influencing " 
each  other. 

Note,  further,  that  the  particular  forms  of  doing  and  suffer- 
ing which  the  mind  conceives  of  as  belonging  to  things,  are 
varied  both  by  the  relations  which  the  same  things  sustain  to 
one  another,  under  the  conditions  of  space  and  time,  and  also 
in  accordance  with  what  is  called  the  "  nature  "  of  the  things 
themselves.  Nor  does  this  nature  hinder  things  from  acting 
in  a  considerable  number  of  differing  ways,  while  maintaining 
the  same  relations  of  space  and  time.  The  same  stone  B  can, 
without  perceptibly  changing  its  place  in  the  structure,  be 
thought  of  as  both  binding  and  separating,  and  as  supporting 
and  pressing  down  —  all  at  the  same  time.  Moreover,  the 
science  of  physics  undertakes  to  show  that  each  stone  is 
simultaneously,  and  without  movement  from  its  position 
as  a  mass,  undergoing  a  considerable  number  of  hidden 
and  mysterious  changes  (thermic,  chemical,  electrical,  etc.), 


296  SUFFICIENT  REASON 

such  as  are  reasoned  about  by  the  separate  branches  of  this 
science. 

The  thorough  student  of  the  mind's  development  can  have 
little  doubt  as  to  the  kind  of  experience  in  which  all  naive 
and  instinctive  reasoning  has  its  origins  and  its  justification : 1 
It  is  the  primal  and  universal  experience  of  man  with  the  Self, 
as  consciously  acting  and  having  its  activity  resisted,  while  at 
the  same  time  observing  the  simultaneous  and  succeeding  changes 
which  go  on  in  the  appearance  of  Things.  This  is  the  very 
same  experience  as  that  in  which  our  cognitions  of  Self  and 
of  Things  have  their  origins  and  justification.  Its  indubitable 
concrete  content  is  given  whenever  the  self-conscious  Self  be- 
comes aware  of  the  terms  of  relation,  so  to  speak,  on  which 
the  very  activity  of  cognition  takes  place  as  a  commerce  of 
Self  with  not-self.  And  this  is  just  as  often  as  it  knows 
things  as  standing  in  relation  to  itself  at  all.  The  original 
connections  along  the  lines  of  which  the  intellect  proceeds, 
and  by  which  it  constantly  orientates  itself  in  its  widest  and 
most  daring  explorations  of  the  entire  domain  of  possible 
knowledge,  are  established  in  the  cognitive  judgment.  So 
far  as  this  is  a  judgment  affirming  real  relations  it  has  its  con- 
tent and  its  connecting  bond  in  an  experience  which  is  more 
than  formal,  —  something  other  than  mere  thought.  The 
causal  nexus  is  an  abstraction  from  the  nisus  of  the  Self,  as 
its  feeling-full  will  is  found  to  change  content  in  dependence 
upon  changes  in  the  perceived  and  remembered  forms  of  the 
not-self.  It  is  self-conscious  activity,  self-known  force,  as 
evinced  in  concrete  doing  and  suffering,  while  the  correlated 
changes  in  the  states  of  things  are  observed,  that  is  here  most 
fundamental,  rather  than  any  a  priori  law  of  intellect  dictat- 
ing changes  according  to  a  fixed  rule  in  time.  For  finite 
thinking,  at  least,  what  Goethe  said  is  true.  Deed,  power, 
are  here  the  logical  antecedent  and  basis  of  thought :  — 

1  For  further  detailed  discussion  and  illustration,  see  "  Psychology,  Descrip- 
tive and  Explanatory,"  chapters  xi.  and  xxi.,  and  "Philosophy  of  Mind," 
pp.  212  f. 


SUFFICIENT  KEASON  297 

"  In  the  beginning  was  the  thought. 
But  study  well  this  first  line's  lesson, 
Nor  let  thy  pen  to  error  overhasten  ! 
Is  it  the  thought  does  all  from  time's  first  hour  ? 
'  In  the  beginning,'  read  then,  'was  the  power.' 
Yet  even  while  I  write  it  down  my  finger 
Is  checked,  a  voice  forbids  me  there  to  linger. 
The  Spirit  helps  1     At  once  I  dare  to  read, 
And  write :  '  In  the  beginning  was  the  deed.'  " 

Cognitive  judgment,  however,  is  not  reached  without  think- 
ing ;  on  the  contrary,  it  is  the  terminal  of  a  process  of  think- 
ing. And  further  functioning  of  intellect  is  necessary  to 
attain  those  more  remote  cognitive  judgments  which  mark  the 
termination  of  prolonged  processes  of  reasoning.  The  nature 
of  this  further  functioning  is  essentially  the  same  as  that 
manifested  in  the  more  primary  of  the  cognitive  judgments. 
The  processes  of  reasoning  which  connect  together  the  judg- 
ments involve  no  new  law  governing  the  intellectual  operations. 
Nor  can  they  be  explained  by  simply  giving  shape  to  an  ab- 
stract formula,  and  then  calling  it  by  either  the  logician's  or 
the  physicist's  favorite  term.  If  in  the  name  of  logic  we 
affirm  the  meaning  of  "  the  principle  of  sufficient  reason  "  to 
be  as  follows,  "  The  intellect  demands  in  explanation  of  all  its 
conclusions  some  reason  which  shall  be  sufficient  as  a  ground 
for  that,  and  no  other,  particular  conclusion,"  no  light  is 
thrown  on  the  real  procedure  of  the  mind.  Indeed,  careful 
examination  shows  such  a  formula  to  be  for  the  most  part 
either  unmeaning  or  tautological.  For  the  important  inquiry 
returns:  What  is  it  for  one  judgment  to  be  "the  ground"  of 
another,  or  to  "  follow  from  "  that  other  as  its  necessary  con- 
clusion ?  And  to  this  inquiry  no  answer  can  be  given  which 
does  not  take  us  back  of  all  mere  reasoning  activity,  as  a 
purely  intellectual  affair,  to  an  immediate  cognitive  experience 
of  the  Self  in  its  changing  relations  to  Things. 

Nor  in  the  phrase  "  sufficient  reason  "  can  any  meaning  be 
given  to  the  word  "  sufficient "  which  does  not  involve  the 


298  SUFFICIENT  REASON 

entire  doctrine  of  the  criteria  of  truth  and  error ;  and  this  is 
altogether  too  elaborate  and  doubtful  an  affair  to  be  involved 
in  the  very  statement  of  a  primal  and  universal  law  of  the 
intellect.  Moreover,  it  is  not  true  to  experience  that  the 
intellect  demands  an  explanation  in  grounds  lying  outside 
of  the  particular,  concrete  process  of  cognition  itself,  for  all 
its  conclusions.  The  rather  does  it  strive  to  take  all  its 
tentative  and  hypothetical  conclusions  back  to  original  cogni- 
tive judgments,  with  the  understanding  that  these,  at  least,  are 
to  be  received  as  having  their  "  grounds,"  their  "  reasons  "  for 
being  held  true,  in  themselves ;  they  are  datum  of  fact.  For 
"  that-which-is-given  "  isjn  no  case  an  unclothed,  naked  "  that," 
a  mere  somewhat  unknowable  but  injected  into  the  process  of 
thought,  to  give  it  some  "  stuff,"  or  matter  of  content,  to  work 
upon.  "  That-which-is-given  "  is  always  this  actual  and  con- 
crete not-me,  cognized  here  and  now  as  being  in  such  and 
such  reciprocally  determining  relations  with  my  Self.  This 
datum  I  do  not  reach,  as  a  pure  intellect,  by  projecting  it  into 
a  subjectively  created  a  priori  frame-work  of  space  and  time ; 
or  by  reasoning  my  way  to  it  as  something  alien  to  my  intu- 
ition, and  needing  to  submit  itself  to  intellect  to  see  if  it  can, 
forsooth !  answer  the  demands  thus  made  upon  it.1  But  I 

1  It  would  be  of  incomparable  value  to  science,  even  in  its  modern  boastful 
devotion  to  the  truth  of  fact,  if  its  students  would,  on  the  one  hand,  be  somewhat 
more  cautious  about  elaborating  trains  of  reasoning  which  contradict  immediate 
experience,  and  if,  on  the  other  hand,  they  would  be  somewhat  more  diligent 
and  unprejudiced  in  the  work  of  reasoning  out  the  conclusions  to  which  experi- 
ence seems  quite  clearly  to  point.  I  more  than  suspect  that  the  observance  of 
these  rules  would  quite  undermine  the  "  arguments  "  by  which  are  supported  such 
theories  as,  for  example,  psycho-physical  parallelism  as  applied  to  the  causal 
relations  of  the  body  and  mind  in  man,  or  that  determinism  in  ethics  which,  under 
a  cover  of  statistical  data,  or  of  materialistic  psycho-physics,  or  of  the  evolutionary 
hypothesis  applied  to  human  history  and  human  society,  really  brings  over  from 
physics  its  often  inept  and  wholly  figurative  conception  of  the  causal  nexus,  and 
plumps  it  down  upon  the  life  of  the  Self.  Is  it  not  well  to  remember  that  the 
business  of  intellect  is  not  to  explain  facts  by  showing  what  can  be  or  cannot  be, 
however  isolated  in  appearance  and  mysterious,  but  to  criticise  alleged  facts,  and 
to  connect  its  own  generalizations  as  to  causes,  and  laws,  etc.,  with  the  facts,  as 
finding  in  them  their  explanation  and  ground  ? 


SUFFICIENT  REASON  299 

find  it  there,  present  with  an  ever-increasing  fulness  of  con- 
tent, as  I  more  attentively  and  shrewdly  observe  what  it  is ; 
and  as  I,  on  the  basis  of  such  observation,  reason  to  con- 
clusions as  to  what  further  it  may  be  or  must  be. 

From  the  points  of  standing  afforded  by  valid  cognitive 
judgments  of  perception  and  of  self-consciousness,  the  intel- 
lect proceeds  in  its  work  of  generalization  and  abstraction. 
It  is  in  these  latter  processes  that  the  form  of  its  functioning 
as  reasoning  faculty  consists.  Our  experience  with  ourselves 
as  acting  in  ways  partly  self-determined  and  partly  determined 
in  dependence  upon  our  changing  relations  to  things,  and  our 
experience  with  things  as  acting  in  different  ways  when  their 
perceived  relations  to  us  and  to  one  another  change,  becomes 
itself  the  subject  of  thought,  feeling,  and  volition.  These 
ways  of  the  behavior  of  things,  when  remembered  and  re- 
flected upon,  are  generalized ;  they  are  abstracted  from  the 
concrete  things  to  which  they  are  always  observed  to  belong, 
and  are  converted  into  classes  of  entities,  powers,  causes,  that 
may  be  thought  of  as  related  to  each  other  in  the  form  of 
laws.  This  is,  of  course,  that  very  procedure  of  thought 
which  produces  conceptual  and  so-called  scientific  knowledge. 
Let  it  be  noted,  however,  that  such  a  procedure  is  not,  in  its 
simplest  expression,  a  fully  conscious  syllogistic  act.  When 
it  is  affirmed  that  the  judgment  "  Adam  Smith  is  mortal "  is 
a  conclusion  from  the  universal  principle  "All  men  are 
mortal,"  through  the  mediate  conception,  or  middle  term, 
"man"  (because  Adam  Smith,  etc.),  the  real  procedure  of 
intellect  is  neither  explained  nor  properly  expressed.  Un- 
less the  mere  name  of  the  individual  —  in  this  case  "  Adam 
Smith "  —  means  to  me  some  man  or  other,  the  problem  of 
the  mortality  of  the  being  designated  by  the  name  is  no  prob- 
lem for  reasoning  at  all.  And,  as  has  been  pointed  out  with 
infinite  pains  by  logicians  themselves,  the  real  difficulty  is 
to  understand  the  right  to  postulate  the  universality  of  the 
general  principle  "  All  men  are  mortal,"  when  as  yet  we 


300  SUFFICIENT  REASON 

have  not  taken  this  particular  man  into  the  account.  But 
in  case  we  admit  this  right,  how  can  any  advance  in  genuine 
knowledge  come  by  so-called  reasoning  ? 

The  formal  difficulty  vanishes  as  soon  as  we  leave  the 
logical  and  assume  the  less  trifling  and  more  profound 
epistemological  point  of  view  from  which  to  regard  the  act 
of  reasoning  and  its  claims  to  validity,  when  applied  to  the 
actual  relations  of  really  existent  things.  Here  two  simple 
but  important  considerations  must  be  kept  in  mind.  First, 
there  is  evidently  some  firmly  established  expectation  of  a 
continuity  in  the  existence  of  things,  and  a  belief  in  a  con- 
siderable amount  of  uniformity  in  the  behavior  of  these  same 
things,  under  their  ordinary  relations  to  us  and  to  one  an- 
other. But,  second,  this  expectation  is  only  a  relative  affair ; 
it  is  not  so  firmly  fixed  that  it  cannot  be  shaken,  and  even 
upset,  by  new  facts  of  cognition ;  nor  can  it  be  claimed  that 
the  belief  applies  in  a  perfectly  inflexible  way  either  to  the 
particular  events  of  experience  or  to  the  entire  world  of 
things.  To  recur  to  the  example  brought  forward  in  the  last 
paragraph :  we  do  expect  confidently  that  Adam  Smith  will 
die ;  and  we  believe  that,  in  fact,  he  is  at  present  so  consti- 
tuted as  to  be  worthy  of  being  called  "  mortal."  This  expec- 
tation is  in  some  sort  an  outgrowth  of  our  general  confidence 
in  the  obedience  (to  speak  figuratively)  of  things  to  laws,  in 
their  fidelity  to  tolerably  consistent  ways  of  behavior.  On 
the  other  hand,  we  are  by  no  means  absolutely  sure  that 
Adam  Smith  may  not  be  an  exception  to  the  general  rule; 
for,  indeed,  alleged  cases  of  exception  exist  which,  although 
lacking  in  sufficient  evidence  to  allow  us  at  once  to  pronounce 
cognitive  judgment  upon  them  as  a  basis,  deserve  to  appear 
in  evidence.  Nor  can  any  one  deny  that  the  reasons,  not 
only  in  theory  but  in  observation,  for  admitting  certain  ex- 
ceptions have  seemed  "sufficient"  to  many  of  our  fellow-men. 
Still  less  warranted  are  we  in  affirming  that  any  known  law 
of  the  behavior  of  things  in  the  whole  universe  is  of  abso- 


SUFFICIENT  REASON  301 

lately  universal  application ;  even  still  less  in  holding  that 
the  system  of  laws  which  constitutes  the  body  of  modern 
physical  science  has  always  been  in  the  past,  or  will  always 
be  in  the  future,  an  inflexible  control  over  the  beings  to 
which  expanding  experience  may  introduce  us. 

The  sceptical  criticism  of  Hume,  in  his  treatment  of  the 
principle  of  causation,  is  quite  invincible  in  one  particular. 
No  account  of  the  terms  on  which  this  principle  is  applied  to 
the  transactions  that  take  place  between  things  can  be  given 
without  admitting  to  this  account  the  determining  influence  of 
belief  and  expectation,  as  bred  of  psychical  habit,  and  as  con- 
stantly confirmed  by  additional  experiences.  This  influence 
is  positive  matter  of  fact.  As  all  critical  thinkers  now  admit, 
we  never  discover,  either  to  sense  or  to  thought,  any  extra- 
mentally  existent  causal  nexus  between  individual  things. 
Nor  do  we  find  in  mere  conceiving,  or  thinking,  the  warrant 
for  affirming  that  such  a  relation  in  reality  exists  between 
them.  Kant's  formal  analysis  of  intellect,  taken  on  his  own 
terms,  does  not  supply  this  needed  warrant.  On  the  other 
hand,  it  is  a  fundamental  law  of  our  psychical  existence  that 
repeated  connections  in  its  "  momenta,"  actually  established, 
excite  the  expectation  of  further  repetitions  of  the  same  con- 
nections. Connections  frequently  and  vividly  impressed  be- 
come regarded  as  legal,  as  naturally  and  rationally  to  be 
expected  ;  and  if  they  are  not  met  with,  then  both  feeling 
and  intellect  seem  offended  and  violated.  The  offence  and 
the  violation  are  primarily  of  an  emotional  and  practical 
origin ;  but  they  are  confirmed  by  those  activities  of  thought 
which  have  actually  terminated  in  judgments  respecting  the 
customary  modes  of  the  behavior  both  of  Self  and  of  Things. 

One  may  safely  go  much  further,  and  yet  conserve  all  the 
interests  of  the  philosophy  of  knowledge,  in  one's  concessions 
to  the  claims  of  a  sceptical  empiricism  upon  this  point.  In- 
deed, in  fidelity  to  truths  of  fact  one  must  go  somewhat 
further.  Knowledge  neither  reposes  upon,  nor  itself  guaran- 


302  SUFFICIENT  REASON 

tees  the  perfectly  unswerving  uniformity  of  natural  laws,  or  of 
the  causal  relations  of  things  to  each  other,  as  a  principle  of 
all  valid  reasoning  about  things.  "The  uniformity  of  na- 
ture," so-called,  cannot  be  strictly  affirmed  as  an  intellectual 
intuition  taking  us  straight  into  the  heart  of  reality ;  nor  is  it 
known  a  priori  as  the  reflection  of  the  uniform  mode  of  all 
reasoning,  the  fundamental  law  of  the  intellect,  projected  into 
a  frame-work  of  space  and  time.  It  is  itself,  the  rather, 
a  growing  impression  or  conviction,  built  up  on  a  basis  of 
conflicting  experiences  which  can  establish  it,  at  last  and  at 
best,  only  in  the  form  of  a  general  working  postulate.  We 
say,  "  on  a  basis  of  conflicting  experiences  ; "  for,  in  fact,  the 
very  data  which  furnish  the  form  for  the  belief  in  such  a  con- 
nection of  the  different  items  of  experience  as  makes  it  possi- 
ble to  reason  from  one  to  another,  largely  argue  against  any 
rigid  construction  for  the  conception  of  uniformity.  This  is 
easily  explicable  as  soon  as  it  is  remembered  how  much  of  the 
most  interesting  and  fruitful  human  experience  concerns  the 
impulsive  volitions,  the  blind,  unbidden  desires,  and  irrational 
strivings,  of  the  Self.  Thus  does  every  man,  at  the  beginning 
largely,  and  to  no  small  degree  all  the  way  through,  act  and 
react  upon  things  in  his  changing  relations,  in  an  irregular 
and  spasmodic  way,  rather  than  so  as  to  emphasize  a  se- 
quence of  events  objectively  determined  according  to  some 
"fixed  rule." 

What  is  true  of  the  basis  for  reasoning,  so  far  as  it  lies 
chiefly  in  the  consciousness  of  Self,  is  also  true  in  a  smaller 
degree  of  the  same  basis  so  far  as  it  lies  in  the  perceived 
relations  of  interacting  things.  To  the  untrained  mind  they 
appear  little  more  obedient  to  law,  or  unswervingly  faithful  to 
the  principle  of  uniformity,  and  so  little  better  fitted  to  serve 
as  points  of  departure  for  assured  processes  of  reasoning,  than 
does  the  Self  when  directing  its  observant  and  expectant  eye 
upon  itself.  Things,  too,  at  the  beginnings  of  mental  develop- 
ment, seem  full  of  caprice,  driven  by  desire,  and  moved  by 


SUFFICIENT  REASON  303 

conscious  strivings,  to  reach  certain  particular  ends.  They 
act,  often  enough,  as  though  they  had  no  respect  for  law. 
But,  none  the  less,  in  many  most  important  and  impressive 
relations,  all  men  are  quickly  compelled  to  learn  that  things 
can  be  depended  upon  to  behave  in  uniform  ways  ;  and  thus 
the  mind  can  construct  formulas  for  the  accustomed  and  well- 
known  modes  of  their  behavior  as  premises,  or  fixed  points 
for  starting,  in  its  ratiocinative  processes.  "  All  fire  burns  ; " 
and,  therefore,  I  expect  this  molten  mass  of  metal  to  burn  me 
unless  I  keep  my  skin  well  cleared  of  contact  with  it.  But  if 
it  be  true  that  a  certain  royal  personage  once  plunged  his 
finger  into  such  a  molten  mass,  with  full  confidence  in  the 
word  of  a  scientific  friend  that,  if  he  would  do  this  quickly, 
no  harm  would  come,  he,  by  deed  done  in  faith,  contradicted 
triumphantly  the  legitimate  conclusion  reached  by  sound 
syllogistic  argument  upon  premises  established  by  his  own 
most  familiar  experience. 

The  growing  accumulation  of  knowledge  as  to  the  custom- 
ary behavior  of  things,  under  given  relations  to  us  and  to 
one  another,  forms  the  basis  for  those  acts  of  reasoning  which 
enter  most  largely  into  life,  and  to  which  reference  was  made 
above.  They  are  general  judgments  which  summarize  the 
experience  given  to  us  in  those  individual  judgments  that 
terminate  the  process  of  thinking  in  recognition  of  the  envis- 
aged relation  of  Self  and  Things,  as  active  and  passive,  and 
thus  bound  together  by  the  feeling-full  and  voluntary  act  of 
cognition  itself.  In  some  sort,  the  leap  to  the  individual 
judgment,  "  This  man  is  mortal ;  "  or  "  This  molten  metal 
will  burn  me,"  may  properly  be  called  a  conclusion.  It  is 
a  "  drawing-out "  of  the  meaning  of  what  is  included  in 
the  general  judgment,  "  All  men  are  mortal ; "  or,  "  All  fiery 
things  will  burn."  But  neither  the  reason  nor  the  sufficiency 
of  the  process  is  to  be  found  in  the  merely  formal  connection 
of  the  conclusion  with  the  premises.  The  ground  of  both 
is  in  the  cognitive  judgments  which  declare  the  original 


304  SUFFICIENT  REASON 

experiences;  and  here  the  nervus  probandi  is  sensitive  to 
stimulations  from  actuality  in  the  form  of  fact.  The  law 
of  the  intellect  is  to  generalize  the  facts.  In  this  work  of 
generalization,  the  intellect  carries  over  to  its  concepts  all  the 
potencies  of  feeling  and  will  with  which  the  Self  knows  itself  to 
be  endowed,  and  which  it  analogically  feels  obliged  to  recognize 
in  Things. 

The  activity  of  the  human  intellect  in  enlarging  the  bounds 
of  knowledge  by  processes  of  reasoning  does  not,  by  any  means, 
stop  with  such  relatively  simple  processes  as  have  already 
been  described.  Suppose,  to  employ  illustrations  which  have 
served  our  purpose  before,  I  inquire :  Why  are  all  men  judged 
mortal  in  such  way  as  that  I  can,  with  reason,  affirm  any  par- 
ticular man  to  be  also  mortal  ?  or,  Why  do  I  regard  the 
stones  in  any  building,  in  spite  of  their  placid  and  unchanging 
appearance,  as  continually  supporting  and  causing  strains, 
etc.  ?  In  answer  to  the  first  question  one  must  consider  in 
a  more  fundamental  way  what  a  "  man  "  is  understood  to  be. 
He  is  an  animal,  a  complex  organism,  a  complicated  piece  of 
molecular  mechanism,  generated  by  a  pair  in  the  species, 
growing  in  subjection  to  physico-chemical  laws  by  metamor- 
phosis of  physical  materials ;  and  so  coming  under  the  most 
general  formulas  for  determining  the  probable  destination 
of  those  materials.  This  now  is,  largely  if  not  chiefly,  what  I 
wish  to  express  by  calling  him  a  man,  —  namely,  an  animal 
of  the  human  species.  And  now  I  can  affirm  the  mortality 
of  each  particular  man,  because  he  is  a  man,  with  a  quite  new 
meaning  to  my  words.  I  now  know  in  a  complicated  way 
a  great  variety  of  reasons  for  the  conclusion  that  "Adam 
Smith"  is  mortal.  These  reasons  are,  in  part,  general  con- 
clusions already  established  along  several  different  lines  of 
concurrent  experiences.  The  number  of  major  premises  from 
which  I  may  now  start  my  processes  of  reasoning  to  the  con- 
clusion is  greatly  increased.  Such  premises  include  not  only 
my  individual  cognitions  about  A,  B,  and  C,  whom  I  have 


SUFFICIENT  REASON  305 

known  as  men,  and  known  to  die,  but  the  accumulated  cogni- 
tions of  centuries  of  experience  respecting  the  nature  of  mat- 
ter, the  origin  and  duration  of  life,  the  cosmic  laws  and 
cosmic  changes,  —  in  brief  "  the  science,"  of  the  animal  called 
"  man."  Here  certainly  we  have  reasoning  of  a  higher  kind  ; 
both  because  it  is  based  on  a  much  enlarged  system  of  cogni- 
tive judgments,  and  also  because  it  is  more  conscious  of  the 
nature,  number,  and  value  of  its  middle  terms. 

The  same  aspect  of  the  reasoning  process  is  laid  bare  by 
a  further  analysis  of  the  other  example  which  was  chosen  for 
illustration.  Experts  in  mechanical  engineering,  when  sum- 
moned to  form  a  judgment  affirming  or  denying  the  safety 
of  a  building,  bring  with  them,  in  their  memories  or  in  their 
pockets,  a  number  of  general  judgments  already  formed, 
which  may  serve  as  major  premises.  The  conclusion  at 
which  they  plan  to  arrive  admits  of  statement  either  in  cate- 
gorical or  hypothetical  form ;  and  either  as  a  statement  of 
present  matter  of  fact  or  as  a  prediction.  Thus  they  may 
conclude,  "  This  building  is  (or  is  nof)  safe ; "  or  "  If  this 
building  is  not  strengthened,  it  will  fall "  (or  the  opposite 
judgment,  "  Even  if  it  is  not  strengthened,  it  will  not  fall "). 
The  major  premises  for  the  argument  leading  to  the  conclu- 
sion are  numerous ;  they  concern  the  strength  of  materials  of 
various  kinds ;  the  laws  of  strains,  loads,  and  resistances, 
and  the  practical  principles  for  distributing  them  properly ; 
the  effects  of  weather,  weights,  and  different  chemical  changes 
upon  the  strength  of  materials  ;  —  in  a  word,  the  mechanics, 
physics,  and  chemistry  of  the  day,  so  far  as  bearing  on  the 
problem.  These  premises  are  themselves  conclusions  reached 
by  a  vast  amount  of  reasoning  which  has  been  more  or  less 
successfully  accomplished  during  scores  of  generations  of 
men.  But  the  original  points  of  starting  from  which  it  was 
concluded  to  these  premises,  to  this  collective  "  science  "  of 
safe  and  proper  building,  were  certain  cognitive  judgments 
representing  known  facts  of  relation.  In  all  these  cognitive 

20 


306  SUFFICIENT  REASON 

judgments  A  was  conceived  of  as  doing  something  to  B  (as 
binding  and  separating,  supporting  and  pressing  down,  pull- 
ing or  resisting,  etc.),  in  a  more  or  less  uniform  way. 

If,  however,  any  such  act  of  reasoning  is  to  proceed  to  its 
desired  accomplishment,  and  conclusive  judgment  is  to  be 
passed,  minor  premises  also  must  be  supplied.  These  must  be 
got,  chiefly,  by  observation  of  the  actual  facts  of  the  particular 
case.  A  —  namely,  that  girder  there  —  is  strong  enough ;  but 
B  —  to  wit,  that  row  of  pillars  yonder  —  is  too  weak  or  is  not 
properly  placed ;  and  C — the  mortar  employed  —  is  dirt,  not 
gritty  sand,  and  has  not  enough  of  good  cement,  and,  "  there- 
fore," not  enough  of  binding  force.  Scanty  reflection  upon 
this  work  of  collecting  minor  premises  shows  at  once  that, 
what  is  expressly  true  of  the  last  of  the  above-mentioned 
three  premises  is  true  of  all  of  those  mentioned  and  of 
all  such  premises  as  can  possibly  be  supplied.  They  imply 
the  confidence  of  the  reasoners  that  the  building  is  itself 
an  extra-mentally  existent  being,  composed  of  a  vast  collec- 
tion of  beings  which  are  all  reciprocally  active  and  passive, 
doing  something  and  having  something  done  to  them,  accord- 
ing to  their  customary  ways.  This  confidence  is  to  be  de- 
rived and  explained  only  in  accordance  with  the  primary 
nature  of  the  operations  of  complex  cognitive  faculty,  as  that 
nature  has  been  critically  examined  in  the  previous  chapters, 
especially  in  the  chapter  upon  "  Knowledge  of  Things  and 
Knowledge  of  Self." 

What  enormous  assumptions !  What  boundless  presump- 
tion !  What  reckless  and  unjustifiable  credulity — unless, 
indeed,  it  be  an  activity  of  the  most  rational,  feeling-full  and 
voluntary  faith  —  is  involved  in  all  this  !  But  whatever  the 
implicates  are,  upon  them,  as  upon  its  only  justifiable  basis, 
does  the  entire  structure  of  physical  science  repose.  As- 
sumption, presumption,  credulity,  —  or  rational,  feeling-full, 
and  voluntary  faith  ?  this,  at  any  rate,  is  not  of  itself  a 
question  to  be  decided  by  ratiocination ;  for  all  reasoning 


SUFFICIENT  REASON  307 

4 

and  especially  all  highly  conceptual  processes  of  reasoning 
require  just  such  premises  as  these.  In  such  premises  all 
reasoning  finds  its  justification  or  its  grounds.  But  the 
assumptions  are  themselves  grounded,  yet  lower  down  and 
further  back,  in  the  primary  acts  of  knowledge ;  they  are 
immanent  in  the  cognitive  judgments  of  our  indubitable 
experiences  with  Self  and  with  Things.  All  major  premises, 
in  themselves  considered,  are,  then,  judgments  of  relation 
between  hypothetical  entities,  such  as  can  never  be  made 
matters  of  self-consciousness  or  of  sense-perception,  and  be- 
tween abstractions  of  properties  and  powers,  such  as  never 
find  a  pure  or  unmixed  realization  in  the  actual  intercourse 
of  things ;  and  these  entities,  properties,  and  powers,  are 
affirmed  to  be  connected  under  terms  of  formulas  which  are 
known  to  be  only  approximately  exact.  The  minor  premises, 
on  the  other  hand,  have  just  been  seen  to  be  shot  through  and 
through  with  those  constructs  of  thought  and  imagination 
which  are  derived  by  the  analogical  projection  into  things  of 
the  self-consciously  recognized  reasons  for  the  Self's  activity 
and  passivity,  in  conformity  with  its  observed  changes  of 
relations  toward  things.  From  the  major  premises,  through 
terms  supplied  by  the  minor  premises,  the  mind  "  draws,"  or 
"  infers,"  or  "  concludes,"  the  terminal  judgment :  "  The 
building  is  (or  is  not)  safe  ;  "  or,  "  The  building  will  (or  will 
not)  fall."  But  if,  as  is  apt  enough  to  be  the  case,  the 
major  premises  are  complicated  and  somewhat  conflicting, 
or  are  not  obviously  applicable,  and  the  needed  minor  prem- 
ises can  be  only  partially  supplied ;  or  even  if  the  theoretical 
or  practical  interests  of  the  reasoners  are  at  variance  as  re- 
spects the  most  "  desirable  "  or  "  fitting  "  conclusion,  then  the 
judgment  terminating  the  ratiocinative  process  may  be  ques- 
tioned, divided,  or  totally  in  doubt.  Some  will  then  say,  the 
building  is  surely  safe ;  but  others  will  say,  it  is  by  no  means 
safe.  One  expert  will  predict  with  confidence  that  it  will 
fall ;  but  two  other  experts  will  offer  to  guarantee  by  a  large 


308  SUFFICIENT  REASON 

sum  of  money  that  it  will  not  fall.  Meanwhile  there  the 
building  stands,  just  as  it  is  and  no  other,  in  a  sort  of  silent 
scorn  of  all  human  attempts  to  penetrate  assuredly  its  entire 
and  most  hidden  nature.  In  despite  of  scientific  predictions, 
in  reality  it  will  fall  or  it  will  not  fall  —  as  it  and  its  natural 
environment  " will"  and  not  as  the  scientific  experts  wish, 
or  think,  or  conclude,  respecting  its  appointed  end. 

It  appears,  then,  that  the  goal  of  that  cognition  after  which 
the  mind  strives  in  its  processes  of  reasoning  is  the  establish- 
ment of  causal  relations  that  have  truth  in  reality.  With  this 
we  believe  ourselves  to  be  concerned,  while  conducting  those 
elaborate  intellectual  operations  by  which  the  real  world 
becomes  known  as  a  complicated  system  of  interrelated  selves 
and  things.  In  order,  therefore,  to  understand  the  meaning 
of  the  reasoning  process,  and  of  the  confidence  it  implies,  as 
well  as  the  limits  of  its  possible  achievements  in  the  way  of 
adding  to  our  knowledge,  we  must  investigate  the  conception 
of  causation  itself.  This  investigation  leads  us  back  to  the 
nature  of  those  primary  experiences  of  knowledge  out  of 
which  comes  all  systematic  knowledge  of  the  world  in  which 
we  live.  Here  we  are  reminded  that  in  knowing  any  thing, 
by  the  most  fundamental  and  primary  cognitions  of  sense- 
intuition,  the  Self  becomes  aware  of  itself  as  active,  and  also 
as  resisted  in  relation  to  that  which  is  not-self,  which  is 
indeed  other  than  Self.  Will  and  other-being,  my  will  and 
other  will,  —  these,  observed,  remembered,  compared,  subjected 
to  all  the  activities  of  a  growing  consciousness  of  discrimina- 
tion, such  as  is  called  the  development  of  intellect,  or  in  a 
word,  thought,  in  the  relation  of  commerce  called  cognition, 
furnish  the  account  of  the  causal  conception.  It  is  this  same 
experience  which  leads  thought  still  further  to  frame  the  con- 
ceptions of  "  conformity  to  law,"  of  "  a  sequence  of  events 
objectively  determined  according  to  a  fixed  rule,"  of  the  "  uni- 
formity of  nature  ;  "  and  to  the  pet  generalization  of  modern 
physical  science :  "  Every  event  happens  only  as  an  effect  ab- 


SUFFICIENT  REASON  309 

solutely  predetermined  by  other  preceding  events  which  con- 
stitute its  cause."  The  experience  itself  is  the  presupposition 
of  the  conception  of  law,  or  invariable  rule,  etc.,  —  however 
we  may  choose  to  phrase  so  abstract  a  summary.  The  formula 
is  only  the  more  or  less  highly  developed  exhibition  of  repeated 
and  indubitable  cognitive  experiences  of  Self  and  Things  as 
known  in  various  relations.  The  fact  is  indubitable,  it  is,  in- 
deed, matter-of-fact  of  every  completed  cognition.  But  the 
establishment  of  uniformities,  laws,  and  forms  of  general  rela- 
tion of  an  abstract  kind,  is  always  a  relative  affair,  never 
complete,  but  subject  always  to  the  possibility  of  doubt.  Our 
cognition  of  the  particular  reasons  which  must  serve  as  middle 
terms  for  the  reasoning  process  is  very  often  uncertain,  vague, 
meagre,  and  ambiguous,  —  no  fitting  representation  of  the 
actual,  indefinitely  manifold,  and  yet  precise  causal  relations 
of  nature.  And,  finally,  this  picture  of  known  causal  rela- 
tions, as  the  only  actual  and  possible  relations,  the  picture, 
namely,  of  a  vast  and  self-contained  mechanism,  every  part  of 
which  is  bound  solidly  together  from  beginning  to  end,  and 
from  centre  to  circumference  by  unyielding  laws,  is  itself  no 
a  priori  structure  of  the  human  intellect.  It  is  not  a  wholly 
defensible  work  of  the  artistic  imagination ;  it  is  not  even  a 
creditable  dream  of  what  may  possibly  sometime  be  reasoned 
out  into  a  conception  resting  on  grounds  of  incontestable  cog- 
nitive judgments.  Much  less  is  it  God's  final  truth  about  the 
whole  matter. 

The  truth  of  our  critical  estimate  of  the  use  of  reason  in 
the  knowledge  of  nature  might  be  elaborately  argued  and  satis- 
factorily established  by  an  appeal  to  the  particular  sciences 
themselves.  This  task,  indeed,  belongs,  with  all  its  details, 
to  the  philosophy  of  nature ;  and  no  other  task  cries  out 
more  loudly  for  some  masterful  hand  to  undertake  it.  The 
physical  and  natural  sciences,  in  spite  of  their  recent  wonder- 
ful advances  (perhaps  rather  in  consequence  of  these  ad- 
vances), were  never  before  so  full  of  abstract  conceptions 


310  SUFFICIENT  REASON 

that  need  a  critical  treatment  by  philosophy.  Our  present 
purpose,  however,  requires  only  a  glance  at  certain  fields 
covered  with  a  mixture  of  flowers,  grains,  and  weeds,  that 
await  the  efforts  of  the  expert  analyzer. 

And  first,  it  may  be  questioned  whether  there  are  any 
physical  laws  so  universal  as  not  to  be  forced  to  recognize 
wholly  inexplicable  exceptions  in  the  very  heart  of  the  domain 
over  which  they  hold  sway.  For  example,  the  law  of  gravita- 
tion affirms  that,  without  exception,  all  physical  bodies  attract 
each  other,  directly  as  their  mass,  and  inversely  as  the  square 
of  their  distance.  But  this  law,  or  abstract  formula,  explains 
only  the  movement  of  bodies  near  the  earth,  of  the  planets 
around  the  sun,  of  the  satellites  around  their  planets,  and  of  a 
select  few  couples  of  the  stars.  It  explains  these  movements 
of  bodies  only  if  other  considerations  may  be  neglected,  such 
as  never  are  in  reality  neglected  by  the  bodies  themselves. 
All  these  bodies  which  most  obviously  fall  under  this  law 
are,  however,  moving  together  onward  in  space  with  an 
apparent  complete  disregard  of  all  other  bodies  outside  of 
their  own  system.  The  directions  and  velocities  of  the  several 
movements  of  the  stars  fall  under  no  common  principle  that 
astronomy  can  discover.  And,  to  take  an  extreme  example, 
one  of  them  ("  1830  Groombridge  ")  is  flying  through  space 
at  a  rate  many  times  as  great  as  it  could  attain  if  it  had 
fallen  through  infinite  space,  from  all  eternity,  toward  the 
entire  physical  universe.  What  caprice  of  Will  gave  it  the 
initial  fling  that  has  enabled  it  so  to  flout  at  the  principle  of 
sufficient  reason  in  the  form  of  the  so-called  "  universal  law 
of  gravitation "  ?  Again,  it  is  a  well-nigh  universal  law  of 
physics  that  both  solids  and  fluids  contract  when  cooled 
and  expand  when  heated ;  but  there  is  the  startling  well- 
known  exception  of  water  at  the  degree  of  freezing.  It 
is  a  law  of  chemistry  which  affords  one  of  the  main  props 
for  the  atomic  theory,  that  fluids  hold  in  solution  more  of  the 
solids  soluble  in  them,  at  a  higher  degree  of  temperature. 


SUFFICIENT  REASON  311 

But  calcium  sulphate  (or  gypsum)  dissolves  to  a  limited  extent 
in  cold  water,  but,  on  a  rise  of  temperature  to  about  135° 
Cent,  it  deposits ;  and  calcium  hydroxid  (common  slaked 
lime)  is  more  soluble  in  hot  than  cold  water.  If  the  case  of 
the  gypsum  is  "  explained "  by  its  passing  from  a  hydrated 
to  an  anhydrous  form,  such  an  explanation  for  the  lime  can 
at  present  only  be  suspected.  And  then  there  is  the  case  of 
common  salt,  which,  for  reasons  only  known  to  itself,  has 
practically  the  same  solubility  in  both  cold  and  hot  water. 
But,  however  these  and  similar  "  exceptions  "  to  laws  of  the 
widest  applicability  may  be  explained,  the  fact  of  there  being 
exceptions  is  itself  what  carries  the  import  of  greatest  use 
to  our  present  discussion.  This  import  administers  a  crush- 
ing rebuke  to  those  who  hold  the  "  reign  of  law  "  (whatever 
this  may  mean)  in  such  manner  as  to  contradict  the  concrete 
internal  and  external  facts  by  which  the  varied  Life  of  Reality 
is  actually  made  manifest. 

Another  field  from  which  to  gather  illustrations  for  our 
present  contention  is  afforded  by  entire  bodies  of  scientific 
truth,  whole  "  sciences,"  so-called.  We  are  not  unmindful 
of  the  fact  that  it  is  customary  to  speak  of  this  "  reign  of  law," 
and  of  the  resulting  uniformity  of  human  nature,  by  students 
of  psychology  and  of  the  psychological  sciences,  of  eco- 
nomics, sociology,  history,  and  even  ethics  and  religion.  But 
here  the  distinction  must  be  insisted  upon  between  knowl- 
edge and  hypothesis,  and  between  an  hypothesis  that  conforms 
to  known  facts  for  their  better  theoretical  handling,  and  one 
which  is  itself  framed  in  the  interests  of  yet  more  doubtful 
hypotheses.  One  might  even  descend  from  psychology  into 
some  of  the  physical  and  natural  sciences  to  illustrate  the 
truth  that  alleged  "  uniformities,"  a  "  reign  of  law,"  and  the 
conception  of  "  sequences  objectively  determined  according 
to  a  fixed  rule,"  are  themselves  too  frequently  abstractions 
unsupported  by  the  facts,  or  even  figments  of  imagination 
most  plainly  contradicted  by  facts.  It  seems  to  us  that  the 


312  SUFFICIENT  REASON 

time  is  fully  come  to  recognize  not  only  the  truth  of  the  frag- 
mentary character  of  all  science,  but  a  far  profounder  and 
more  wide-reaching  truth.  How  do  we  know  that  it  is  the 
Nature  of  Things  to  be  under  "  universal  laws,"  if  by  this 
term  be  meant  fixed  rules  imposed  from  without,  or  lying 
mysteriously  immanent  in  things  ?  How  do  we  know  that 
uniformity,  in  the  sense  of  unceasing  repetition  of  the  old 
relations  according  to  unchanging  formulas,  is  the  funda- 
mental principle  followed  by  the  Really  Existent  ?  If  now 
an  appeal  is  made  to  the  past  successes  of  this  assumption, 
the  case  is  not  at  all  so  conclusive  as  it  is  customarily 
represented  to  be. 

In  all  of  the  physical  and  natural  sciences,  improved 
methods  of  observation  have  recently  extended  the  number 
of  inexplicable  single  facts,  and  of  whole  classes  of  such  facts, 
much  faster  than  the  reasoning  faculty  has  been  able  to  pro- 
vide laws  for  them.  The  seventeenth  and  eighteenth  cen- 
turies were  characterized  by  a  few  splendid  generalizations, 
which  seemed  to  their  discoverers  and  to  the  age  destined  to 
reduce  the  entire  universe  to  a  mechanical  system  whose  terms 
should  be  strictly  calculable.  In  these  generalizations  was  to 
be  found  the  unfailing  source  of  the  "  reasons  "  why  things 
behaved  as  they  always  did  behave;  and  also  the  "  grounds" 
of  the  confident  predictions  that  they  would  continue  unswerv- 
ingly to  behave  in  the  same  way.  In  the  present  century, 
when  the  Darwinian  hypothesis,  in  spite  of  the  pitifully  narrow 
range  of  observed  facts  and  of  incontestable  judgments  of 
experience  on  which  it  was  "  grounded,"  was  placed  by  Mr. 
Huxley  and  its  other  ardent  admirers  on  a  level, for  certitude, 
with  the  principle  of  gravitation,  it  seemed,  indeed,  as  though 
all  life,  even  up  to  the  life  of  the  artistic,  religious,  and  cog- 
nitive spirit  of  man,  was  about  to  be  formulated  by  similar 
treatment.  Nor  are  claimants  for  the  name  of  "  science  "  yet 
wanting  who  neglect  a  truly  scientific  reserve,  and  are  ready 
to  accept  or  reject,  to  interpret  fairly  or  to  sophisticate,  the 


SUFFICIENT  REASON  313 

facts  according  as  they  bear  upon  foregone  general  conclusions 
confirming  their  particular  theory  of  evolution. 

On  the  whole,  however,  the  nineteenth  century  —  and 
especially  the  last  quarter  of  it — has  been  growing  into  a 
distrust  of  glittering  generalizations,  with  their  high-sounding 
claims  to  reign  over  the  whole  realm  of  the  concrete,  content- 
full,  and  seemingly  capricious  and  ever  mysterious  Being  of 
the  World.  Even  astronomy,  the  most  mathematical  and 
deductive  of  the  applied  sciences,  has  of  late  been  multiplying 
facts  faster  than  it  has  been  able  to  reduce  them  to  the 
uniformity  of  laws,  by  reflecting  upon  their  connections 
through  either  known  or  hypothetical  middle  terms.  And  — 
to  pass  at  once  to  the  other  extreme  —  he  who  has  seen  an 
amoeba  and  a  fresh-water  hydra,  after  due  preparation  and 
preliminary  skirmishes,  fight  it  out  to  a  finish  in  truly  heroic 
and  artistic  fashion,  is  much  more  likely  henceforth  to  con- 
ceive of  them  as  beings  with  appetites,  passions,  conscious 
cunning,  and  no  mean  resources  of  will  and  intellect,  than 
as  molecular  mechanisms  that  may  soon  be  served  up  as 
examples  of  problems  solved  in  thermo-dynamics  and  the 
lawful  action  of  merely  physico-chemical  forces.  So,  too, 
when  one  hears  what  is  given  out  as  a  "  science  "  of  sociology 
in  terms  of  biological  and  mechanical  evolution,  with  much 
talk  of  "  social  forces,"  "  social  organism,"  and  of  inexorable 
"  laws "  to  which  this  organism  is  subject ;  and  when  one 
turns  to  face  the  concrete  and  life-like  picture  of  the  multi- 
tudes of  men  in  the  present  world  and  in  the  course  of  history  ; 
then,  too,  one  inclines  to  believe  that  these  souls  are  them- 
selves the  forces,  and  that  their  ever  varying  and  self-chosen 
relations  to  the  world  of  things  and  to  each  other  are  the  laws 
which  constitute  the  figuratively  so-called  social  organism. 
Forces  are  not  existent,  so  far  as  the  science  of  sociology 
goes,  until  the  souls  are  existent ;  they  are  no  more  uniform 
than  are  the  souls  from  which  the  forces  spring.  And  as  to 
laws  of  a  "  social  organism,"  there  are  none,  except  those 


314  SUFFICIENT  REASON 

which  are  made  by  the  action  and  interaction  of  the  souls 
themselves.  But  these  are  not  ready-made  laws,  as  it  were  ; 
they  are  only  the  actual,  but  ceaselessly  varying  and,  as  we 
hope,  improving  modes  of  the  behavior  of  the  individual 
members  of  the  so-called  organism. 

In  brief,  men  reason  about  things  for  practical  purposes, 
and  thus  know  them  increasingly  so  far  as  getting  along  well 
with  them  is  concerned.  Fortunately,  those  things  that  most 
nearly  determine  human  daily  interests,  the  common  weal  or 
woe,  are  found  to  be  tolerably  consistent  in  their  behavior. 
The  solid  ground  on  which  men  walk,  the  sources  of  their 
support,  the  implements  they  handle,  and  in  much  inferior 
degree,  the  animals  of  their  customary  intercourse  are  fairly 
trustworthy.  But  sometimes  out  of  a  clear  sky  the  light- 
ning strikes  ;  or  out  of  a  sweet  air  the  Russian  influenza 
falls ;  the  weather  and  the  dependent  crops  are  uncertain ; 
all  learn  to  be  cautious  in  matters  involving  the  behavior  of 
the  lower  animals  and  of  their  fellow-men  ;  and  those  who 
reside  in  Japan  know  that,  at  any  moment,  the  ground  beneath 
them  may  be  lifted  aloft  or  sunk  into  the  depths.  Neverthe- 
less, further  and  more  careful  observation,  helped  on  so  far 
as  possible  by  experiment,  gives  grounds  for  reasoning  to  a 
new  and  higher  confidence  in  things.  In  a  measurable  de- 
gree we  discover  middle  terms,  in  the  form  of  minute  entities 
(the  molecules  and  atoms),  or  of  hidden  masses  (the  internal 
fires  and  caverns  underground),  or  of  unsuspected  properties 
and  relations  (thermic,  chemical,  biological)  which  serve  to 
connect  the  seemingly  contradictory  experiences  into  a  more 
rational  whole.  Many  of  these  connections,  at  first  hypo- 
thetical, lead  to  somewhat  broad  generalizations  which,  when 
they  are  themselves  employed  as  major  or  minor  premises, 
land  the  mind  on  the  firm  ground  of  verifiable  cognitive 
judgments  again.  Expectations  are  modified  ;  some  are 
strengthened  and  others  abandoned.  The  courses  of  the 
reasoning  processes  and  of  the  concluding  judgments  are 


SUFFICIENT  REASON  315 

changed.  The  convictions  which  give  them  their  special 
cogency  prove  alterable,  in  respect  of  degree  and  of  points  of 
application.  Even  the  general  conviction  that  by  reasoning 
man  can  find  out  the  ultimate  Being  of  the  World,  or  extend 
his  cognitions  of  its  actual  nature  and  uniform  modes  of 
behavior  (if,  indeed,  IT  has  such  modes),  is  sometimes  shaken. 
But,  on  the  whole,  the  conception  of  the  World  of  Things  as 
some  sort  of  a  Unity  is  enriched  and  deepened. 

Once  more  at  this  point,  however,  we  must  return  to  make 
further  examination  of  our  knowledge  of  Self  and  of  Things 
as  a  basis  for  the  general  confidence  in  our  reasoning  processes. 
It  will  be  found  that  all  "  reasons,"  or  "  grounds,"  from  which 
conclusions  are  drawn  may  be  divided  into  two  quite  dif- 
ferent classes.  Both  these  classes  of  reasons  are  employed 
in  every  completed  process  of  reasoning.  Both  of  them, 
moreover,  when  examined,  quickly  lead  our  thought  to  the 
limits  of  what  is  immediately  known  ;  and  from  there  they 
point  it  beyond  to  what  must  always  be  a  matter  of  rational 
postulating,  or  abstract  theorizing,  or  fanciful  conjecture. 
These  two  classes  of  reasons  are  embodied  in  current  con- 
ceptions of  the  "nature"  of  things  as  both  active  and  pas- 
sive, and  of  the  further  conditions  determining  the  modes 
of  activity  or  passivity,  as  found  in  the  "  relations  "  of  things. 
Thus  the  complete  reasons  for  the  behavior  of  things  are 
thought  to  reside  both  in  their  own  nature  and  in  their 
relations  to  other  things. 

When,  for  example,  I  let  a  certain  quantity  of  a  gas  0 
mingle  with  a  certain  quantity  of  a  gas  H,  under  determinate 
relations  of  temperature,  pressure,  etc.,  =  JT,  I  find  that  a 
compound  of  a  totally  new  nature,  W,  is  the  result.  I  therefore 
express  my  knowledge  of  the  chemical  constitution  of  water 
by  the  formula  H2  0 ;  and  my  knowledge  of  the  law  of  the 
combination  of  hydrogen  and  oxygen  gases,  when  brought 
under  the  relations  of  X,  to  be  a  proportion  of  2002  to  1000. 
This  is  reasoned  and  conceptual,  or  scientific,  knowledge.  But 


316  SUFFICIENT  REASON 

now  if  I  press  still  further  my  inquiry  after  reasons,  and  de- 
mand to  know  why  this  thing,  0,  behaves  in  this  particular 
and  no  other  way,  when  it  is  brought  under  these  precise,  and 
no  other  quite  dissimilar  relations  to  this  other  thing,  IT;  and 
if  I  also  demand  to  know  as  much  with  regard  to  the  latter, 
the  H,  I  can  hardly  fall  back  on  reasons  at  all.  I  can  only 
blindly  say:  It  is  the  "nature"  of  0  and  If  so  to  behave, 
under  these  and  no  other  dissimilar  "  relations."  But  then, 
the  chemist  can  describe  many  other  modes  of  the  behavior 
of  both  0  and  H,  under  a  great  variety  of  relations  besides  X 
to  an  almost  endless  number  of  other  things,  with  natures  of 
their  own.  But  why  is  it  the  nature  of  0  and  of  H  precisely 
so  to  behave ;  and  why  do  these  particular  relations,  X,  have 
anything  decisive  to  do  with  the  changing  modes  of  the  be- 
havior of  these  things  ?  To  such  a  question  no  answer  can 
be  found ;  in  fact  the  things  do  so  behave,  and  in  fact  rela- 
tions of  things  do  always  have  to  do  with  how  things  behave. 
The  limit  of  all  cognition  by  reasoning  has  been  reached  in  the 
unreasoning  recognition  of  cognized  facts. 

"  We  have  no  answer  to  make,"  and  "  We  have  reached 
the  limit  of  all  cognition,"  —  but  only  if  we  are  unable 
to  get  the  facts  into  our  consciousness  in  another  way,  and 
thus  to  regard  them  from  a  new  and  higher  point  of  view. 
For  if  the  cognized  facts  are  deeds  done  by  a  Self,  with  a  con- 
sciously recognized  end  in  view,  then  it  is  possible  to  explain 
to  its  very  centre  the  "  reason"  for  the  facts.  If  I  simply  find 
myself  to  be  acting  and  suffering  in  certain  more  or  less 
uniform  ways,  with  relation  to  observed  changes  in  the  active 
and  passive  condition  of  things,  but  without  any  conscious 
discrimination  or  choice  of  aught  to  be  gained  as  a  good,  or 
avoided  as  an  evil,  I  have  no  further  reason  to  give,  or  to 
seek,  for  such  facts.  They  are  so,  and  that  is  the  end  of  the 
matter.  To  ask,  further,  why  they  are  so  is  to  ask  an 
absurd  and  unanswerable  question.  But  in  experience  this  is 
not  the  case  with  all  deeds  of  cognition.  Certain  items,  and 


SUFFICIENT  REASON  317 

those  not  a  few,  in  my  experience  do,  indeed,  end  in  this 
way.  Thus  I  act  and  thus  I  suffer,  without  any  conscious- 
ness of  a  "why,"  of  a  reason  for  acting  and  suffering  thus 
rather  than  in  some  totally  different  way.  That  is  to  say, 
out  of  the  dark  and  incomprehensible  "  ground  "  of  my  own 
nature  in  its  unintelligible  relations  to  the  dark  and  incom- 
prehensible nature  of  things,  these  states  of  my  being  seem 
to  proceed.  Such  procedure  in  reality  makes  necessary  the 
ending  of  my  own  reasoning  processes  in  that  which  is  not  a 
subject  for  reasoning.  On  the  other  hand,  certain  other  items 
of  my  experience  —  and  these  not  few  in  number,  but  of  the 
greatest  practical  and  sesthetical  as  well  as  cognitive  import 
—  involve  the  consciousness  of  activity  and  of  passivity  as 
determined  by  chosen  forms  of  intercourse  with  things,  in 
the  pursuit  of  conscious  ends.  This  part  of  my  experience, 
when  made  the  subject  of  further  reflection,  throws  a  new 
light  upon  the  meaning  and  the  limits  of  reasoning.  It  leads 
to  a  consideration  of  the  teleology  of  all  knowledge,  and  of 
the  corresponding  immanence  of  final  purpose  in  the  really 
existent  objects  of  knowledge. 

Nor  can  the  consciousness  of  an  end  be  separated  from  the 
explanation  of  the  nature,  and  the  defence  of  the  validity  of 
any  act  of  reasoning.  This  consciousness  is  operative  in  the 
determination  of  the  primary  cognitive  judgments  from  which 
all  reasoning  takes  its  start.  This  consciousness  itself  forms 
a  part  of  the  original  experience  with  the  causal  conception  ; 
and  it  gives  characteristic  coloring  to  the  "  connection,"  to 
the  "bond,"  which  is  assumed  to  exist  between  Self  and 
Things,  as  well  as  among  things  themselves.  We  are  not 
unaware  of  the  present  wide-spread  denial  of  this  fact ;  and 
alas !  of  the  sometimes  monstrous  and  mischievous  conclusions 
derived  from  this  denial.  It  is  enough  at  present  to  stand  by 
those  facts  which  are  indisputable  and  inseparable  "  momenta  " 
and  presuppositions  of  all  knowledge.  The  "grounds"  on 
which  all  acts  of  reasoning  repose,  so  far  as  they  can  possibly 


318  SUFFICIENT  REASON 

be  explored  by  an  analysis  of  knowledge  itself,  are  laid  hare 
when  we  behold  the  nature  of  the  Self  revealing  itself  in  the 
pursuit  of  some  conscious  good.  This  is  the  final  answer  to 
the  question  "  Why  ?  "  And  the  answer  cannot  be  divorced 
from  the  conception  of  that  causal  relation  which  all  reason- 
ing assumes  as  binding  together,  in  reality,  the  things  of  the 
physical  world.  For  it  is  in  the  same  experience  that  the 
answer  to  the  question  "  By  what  cause  determined  ? "  has 
its  origin  and  its  import. 

A  sleeping  postulate,  therefore,  underlies  all  our  account  of 
the  principle  of  sufficient  reason.  The  explication  of  this 
postulate  belongs  to  metaphysics  as  ontology.  But  we  must 
recognize  it  as  implicate  in  a  satisfactory  theory  of  knowledge. 
Two  somewhat  opposed  directions,  however,  seem  indicated 
for  this  theory,  if  it  would  conform  itself  to  the  facts 
of  cognition  considered  as  falling  under  the  principles  of 
identity  and  sufficient  reason.  One  direction  follows  the  lines 
of  thinking  rather  in  opposition  to  those  of  the  actual  being 
of  things ;  the  other  seeks  to  demonstrate  that  the  forms  of 
thought  are  the  forms  of  the  being  of  things.  One  teaches 
us  to  consider  how  much  of  an  antecedently  unthinkable  sort 
seems  necessary  in  order  to  give  full  recognition  to  the  nature 
and  the  limits  of  our  reasoning  processes.  The  particular, 
the  unique,  even  the  perverse  and  contradictory,  interpene- 
trates the  content  of  knowledge.1  Every  act  of  cognition  is 
a  problem,  and  the  problem  cannot  be  solved  by  reasoning 
alone.  The  very  Being  and  the  Becoming  of  the  World,  as 
given  to  the  human  mind,  seems  full  of  contradictions.  IT 
is  the  great  riddle  itself ;  and  there  is  none  greater  to  be  sus- 
pected behind  it.  The  extreme  apriorism  which  maintains 
the  absolute  universality  and  objective  necessity  of  those 
inner  modes  of  apprehension  that  are  employed  upon  the 
world  of  things  may  fitly  be  criticised  by  showing  to  how 

1  Compare  Uphues,  Kritik  des  Erkennens,  p.  106.  Lasson,  Der  Satz  vom 
Widersprnche,  Philosophische  Vortrage,  1885,  pp.  208  f. 


SUFFICIENT  REASON  319 

low  and  pitiful  a  condition  this  alleged  universality  and 
necessity  may  fall.  Even  the  logical  and  mathematical  prin- 
ples  upon  which  the  advocate  of  this  extreme  apriorism  bases 
his  claims  may  in  certain  cases  show  unmistakable  signs  of 
being  "  shaky  "  or  of  entirely  giving  way. 

And  further,  if  the  attempt  be  made  to  exalt  either  of  the 
most  primary  principles  of  all  human  thinking  to  the  place 
of  an  autocrat  or  irresponsible  creator  of  cognitive  judgments, 
and  to  hypostasize  either  of  them  as  a  formula  representative 
of  the  complete  being  of  the  world,  the  reward  for  the  attempt 
is  not  a  knowledge  of  Reality,  but  a  delusive  mistaking  of 
formal  abstractions  for  the  real  content  of  things.  In  the 
name  of  the  "  Principle  of  Identity "  the  innermost  essence 
of  Reality  has  often  enough  been  proclaimed  as  Absolute, 
changeless  Being,  whose  conception  cannot  be  constructed 
further  without  self-destruction.  A  =  A  is,  indeed,  a  prop- 
osition which  appears  to  have  a  demonstrated  simplicity  and 
clearness ;  or  rather,  an  indisputable  a  priori  character  which 
puts  it  beyond  all  need  of  demonstration.  But  A  =  A  is 
nothing  but  an  empty,  meaningless  symbol,  to  which  no 
known  reality  corresponds  or  ever  can  be  conceived  of  as 
corresponding.  In  our  self-consciousness,  where  all  cognition 
begins,  and  to  which  it  ever  returns  for  fresh  sources  of  a 
vitally  renewing  kind,  the  abolition  of  the  fundamental  oppo- 
sition between  subject  and  object  is  a  return  to  nescience  so 
complete  as  to  be  quite  unable  to  state  itself  even  in  negative 
form.  And  when  the  doctors  of  philosophy  have  put  to  sleep, 
or  quite  annulled,  the  living  process  of  a  self-realizing  Cosmos, 
they  can  never  restore  what  is  gone  by  uttering  over  the 
corpse  incantations  in  the  name  of  a  mystical  Principle  of 
Identity.  Moreover,  every  concrete  application  of  this  prin- 
ciple must  be  made  only  on  grounds  of  actual  cognitive  judg- 
ments ;  and  critical  examination  must  test  each  application. 
For  the  processes  of  thinking  and  the  actual  connections  of 
Reality  cannot  be,  off-hand  and  without  a  sceptical  and 
critical  process,  identified. 


320  SUFFICIENT  REASON 

The  same  cautions  must  be  observed  with  regard  to  the 
Principle  of  Sufficient  Reason,  objectively   applied   as  a   so- 
called  universal  law  of  causality.     The  abstract  conception  of 
causality   is   itself  no   ground   of   explanation  ;  there   is   no 
sufficient  warrant  for  its  being  raised  to  the  place  of  supreme 
adoration  and  hypostasized  as  embodying  the  whole  essence 
of   the  really  existent  World.     Especially  inept  is  that  pro- 
cess of  reasoning  which,  after  having  based  itself  upon  this 
very  conception  of   causality,  proceeds   to  divide   the  world 
of   reality   into   two  unrelated  halves,  two  disconnected  pro- 
cesses, that  run  on  eternally  as  it  were,  side  by  side.1     But 
without   employing    again   the   causal   principle   to    connect 
together   thoughts    and  things,  we  are  never  able  to  get  one 
glimpse  of  a  reason  why  the  processes  should  be  two  rather  than 
more,  or  even  infinite  in  number  ;  or  why  thoughts  and  things 
should  run  parallel  rather  than  at  right  angles  ;  or  how  out 
of  this  diversity  of  actually  disconnected  processes  the  unity 
of  experience  and  the  Unity  of  the  World  can  come.     Is  it  not 
an  astonishing  outcome  of  the  tenderness  shown  this  principle 
of   sufficient   reason,   as  employed  for  the  interpretation    of 
Reality,  that  it  should  be  so  hardened  as  to  become  unable  to 
depart  from  one  of  these  two  lines  of  process  and  thus  bind 
together  into  one  the  physical  and  the  psychical  World  ?     But 
no  less  surprising  and  self  contradictory  is  the  outcome  of 
every  attempt  to  vindicate  an  absolute  logico-mathematical 
necessity  for  the  really  Existent,  in  the  name  of  the  principle 
of  sufficient  reason  or  of  its  objective  correlate,  the  principle 
of  causality.     The  suppositions  of  eternally  unchanging  uni- 
formity of  mass,  or  of  force,  and  of  complete  similarity  of 
conditions,   with   rigid   bonds   of   law  binding  together   the 
entire  mechanism,  are  abstractions  which  are  neither  derived 
from  the  sum-total  of  experience,  nor  do  they  accord  with 
this  sum-total. 

But  the  result  of  a  critical  examination  of  the  principles  of 

1  As,  for  example,  Paulsen  does ;  Introduction  to  Philosophy,  pp.  87  f. 


SUFFICIENT  REASON  321 

identity  and  sufficient  reason  is  not  such  as  to  let  the  entire 
structure  of  human  knowledge  dissolve,  at  this  point,  in  the 
caustic  of  hopeless  contradictions,  or  disappear  in  the  soft 
mists  of  an  equally  hopeless  agnosticism.  The  mind  of  man 
retains  its  undying  confidence  in  the  possibility,  by  reasoning 
processes,  of  gaining  an  increasingly  large  and  true  cognition 
of  Reality.  It  will  bear  chastening,  but  it  will  not  lie  down  in 
despair.  And  it  need  not  do  this  in  order  to  vindicate  its 
confidence  in  the  rationality  and  validity  of  its  own  procedure. 
For  Causality  is  itself  no  invincible  bond  that,  in  a  quasi-exter- 
nal way,  seizes  hold  of  things  and  forces  them  into  a  Unity. 
Neither  is  it  necessary  to  go  out  of  experience  to  realize  that 
causal  nexus,  in  the  confidence  of  which  our  reasoning  about 
things  continually  proceeds.  This  nexus  is,  after  all,  when 
profoundly  inspected  and  analyzed  by  critical  reflection,  not 
so  much  like  the  external  connections  of  a  machine,  which 
lay  themselves  bare  before  the  eye  of  sense,  as  it  is  like  the 
interiorly  recognized  and  felt  connections  of  a  conscious  and 
reasoning  Self. 

This,  then,  is  the  conception  which  is  suggested  as  the  pos- 
tulated truth  of  the  nature  of  the  Being  of  the  World.  It  is, 
after  the  analogy  of  the  Life  of  a  Self,  striving  forward  to  a 
more  and  more  complete  self-realization  under  the  consciously 
accepted  motif  of  immanent  Ideas.  This  conception,  we  say, 
is  suggested.  It  appears  as  the  sleeping  postulate  whose  pres- 
ence and  potency  must  be  recognized  if  we  would  understand 
and  validate  the  employment  of  ratiocination  for  the  increase 
of  our  knowledge  of  the  World.  The  postulate  implies,  (1) 
some  sort  of  unitary  Being  for  this  really  Existent ;  (2)  that 
this  Being  is  Will ;  (3)  that  the  differentiation  of  the  activity 
of  this  Will,  and  the  connection  of  the  differentiated  "mo- 
menta,"—  the  separate  beings  of  the  world,  —  is  teleological 
and  rational,  like  that  of  our  own  Self.  But  it  is  the  task 
of  metaphysics  to  criticise  and  develop  such  statements  as 
these. 

21 


CHAPTER  XI 

EXPERIENCE  AND  THE  TRANSCENDENT 

THAT  man  can,  in  no  manner  and  under  no  conceivable 
circumstances,  transcend  his  own  experience  is  custom- 
arily thought  to  be  a  proposition  so  self-evident  as  to  stand  in 
need  of  neither  argument  nor  explanation.  But  the  history 
of  the  controversies  which  have  raged  for  centuries  between 
extreme  empiricists  and  their  opponents  shows  clearly  enough 
that  explanation,  at  least,  is  imperatively  demanded  for  the 
proposition  itself.  Indeed,  the  shifting  meanings  which  are 
given  by  the  contestants  to  such  terms  as  "  experience,"  "  cog- 
nition," "  the  transcendent,"  etc.,  and  to  the  concepts  of  rela- 
tion embodied  in  the  various  judgments  that  affirm  or  deny 
the  possibility  of  effecting  a  union  between  these  terms,  are 
the  most  significant  thing  in  the  greater  part  of  the  contro- 
versy. It  is  important,  then,  for  every  attempt  at  an  episte- 
mology  to  raise  such  questions  as  the  following :  What  is  to  be 
understood  by  the  term,  "  experience  "  ?  What  is  the  relation 
of  knowledge  to  experience  ?  and,  What  would  it  be  to  tran- 
scend experience  by  cognition,  or  in  some  other  way,  if  only 
such  a  thing  could  be  conceived  of  as  possible  ? 

The  history  of  epistemological  discussion  discloses  a  sur- 
prising characteristic  group  or  set  of  fallacies.  They  are  of 
such  an  order  as  to  awaken  one's  shame  and  distrust  respect- 
ing the  power  of  the  human  intellect  to  treat  fairly  its  own 
most  familiar  modes  of  activity.  For  the  most  part,  they 
seem  to  be  connected  with  the  misapplication  of  a  single, 
easily  apprehensible  figure  of  speech.  Empiricists  generally, 


EXPERIENCE  AND  THE  TRANSCENDENT  323 

and  their  opponents  quite  too  frequently,  argue  about  "  Ex- 
perience" as  though  it  were  actually  some  material  thing, 
having  a  fixed  or  a  changeable  and  expansive  area,  as  spread 
out  in  space.  Certainly,  if  experience  is  like  a  circle  which 
includes  only  what  is  within  its  own  area  and  by  virtue  of  its 
very  nature  excludes  all  else,  then,  by  defining  experience  in- 
clusively enough,  the  necessity  of  its  being  absolutely  exclusive 
of  what  transcends  its  own  limits  may  easily  be  shown.  Or,  to 
bring  up  again  the  figure  of  speech  which  Kant  so  effectively 
employed :  —  and  now  experience  is  an  island,  surrounded  by 
a  boundless  ocean  of  impenetrable  mists  and  fogs.  Moreover, 
since  this  island  has  its  circuit  eternally  fixed  by  the  unchang- 
ing laws  of  pure  understanding,  it  can  never  make  advances 
into  the  surrounding  ocean.  And  since  the  critical  philosophy 
has  made  a  finality  of  the  exploration  of  this  island,  all  its 
inhabitants  should  cease  to  delude  themselves  with  the  hope 
of  some  day  passing  beyond  its  rocky  coast-lines.  Only,  since 
they  are  possessed  of  reason  as  well  as  of  understanding,  they 
will  doubtless  keep  on  turning  the  spy-glass  of  an  "  illusory 
logic  "  toward  the  paradise  over-seas,  where  God,  Freedom, 
and  Immortality  are  imagined  to  be,  and  whence  comes  the 
attractive,  siren-like  song  of  the  transcendent  ideas.  Even 
Kant  will  allow  —  nay !  he  will  by  and  by  demonstrate  — 
the  necessity  of  a  faith  which  shall  overreach  the  limits  so 
inexorably  fixed  by  experience  to  human  scientific  and  spec- 
ulative cognition. 

Now,  by  all  the  most  primary  concepts  of  geometry,  it  is 
forbidden  that  circles,  laid  out  on  flat  surfaces,  shall  include 
and  exclude  at  one  and  the  same  time.  For  is  not  the  very  defi- 
nition of  a  circle, — so  much  of  space  only  as  is  included  within 
a  curved  line  that  is  drawn  through  points  equidistant  from  a 
central  point,  until  it  returns  upon  itself  ?  And  circles  con- 
structed according  to  the  modern  "  higher  geometry,"  with 
their  inconceivable  qualities  contradictory  of  the  plainest  re- 
quirements of  the  mind  that  imagines  d  la  Euclid,  may  fitly 


324  EXPERIENCE   AND   THE   TRANSCENDENT 

be  denied  all  likeness  to  "  experience."  For  is  not  experience 
supposed  to  have  something  to  do  with  actual  existences  ?  And 
actual  circles  are  never  known  to  behave  in  any  such  contra- 
dictory fashion.  Islands,  too,  although  exceedingly  change- 
able as  to  boundaries  in  certain  cases,  and  sometimes  even 
disappearing  in  the  depths  of  their  surrounding  ocean  or  ris- 
ing into  mid-air  on  the  wings  of  submarine  volcanic  forces,  do 
not  include  and  exclude  the  same  territory  at  one  and  the 
same  time.  Thus  far,  at  least,  they  submit  to  the  funda- 
mental principle  of  identity ;  and  if  they  ever  change  the 
limits  of  their  territory,  they  do  this  in  accordance  with  the 
principle  of  sufficient  reason. 

But,  after  all,  is  the  total  experience  of  man  precisely  like 
a  geometrically  correct  circle,  or  like  an  island  with  fixed 
boundaries  ?  Is  it  even  enough  like  either  to  allow  us  to  pro- 
claim, as  a  self-evident  proposition,  that  it  cannot  include  and 
exclude  at  one  and  the  same  time  ?  May  it  not,  at  least,  in- 
clude in  one  sense  what  it  excludes  in  another  sense  of  these 
two  words  ? 

Doubtless,  the  origin  and  nature  of  all  language  is  such 
that,  even  when  we  are  employing  terms  current  among  think- 
ers acquainted  with  the  very  highest  critical  philosophy,  the 
spatial  and  "  thing-like  "  meaning  of  words  is  exceedingly  in- 
fluential. It  would  be  awkward,  indeed,  and  we  fear  practi- 
cally useless,  to  attempt  so  to  express  ourselves  on  this  subject 
as  to  escape  all  influence  from  this  meaning;  indeed,  the 
meaning  itself  reveals  a  considerable  number  of  important 
truths  connected  with  the  philosophy  of  knowledge.  For  the 
present,  then,  we  shall  continue  to  employ  words  which  carry 
with  them  the  influences  inseparable  from  the  figure  of  speech 
they  embody.  In  succeeding  chapters,  where  the  attempt 
will  be  made  to  analyze  more  critically  and  in  detail  the  con- 
clusions somewhat  crudely  and  plumply  affirmed  in  this  chap- 
ter, other  terms  may  be  substituted  that  are  better  adapted, 
perhaps,  to  reveal  the  real  truth  of  the  case.  But  here  our 


EXPERIENCE  AND   THE   TRANSCENDENT  325 

main  purpose  is  simply  to  expose  the  problem,  and  the  char- 
acteristic fallacies  which  have  so  frequently  embarrassed  its 
solution.  Preserving  the  same  language,  with  its  figurative 
meanings,  we  affirm,  then :  However  extensive  in  its  meaning 
we  make  this  word,  "  Experience"  critical  examination  shows 
that  experience  is  always  and  necessarily  transcended  by  cog- 
nition. The  answer  to  the  question  whether  man  can  trans- 
cend his  own  experience  is  this :  If  man  did  not  transcend  his 
own  experience,  he  could,  as  a  man,  have  no  cognitive  expe- 
rience. This  is  what  makes  some  of  our  experience  rational, — 
namely,  that  it  does,  in  a  peculiar  manner  and  to  a  most  mar- 
vellous extent,  always  transcend  itself.  Indeed,  the  immanent 
and  the  transcendent,  the  inclusive  and  the  exclusive,  the 
merely  subjective  and  the  trans-subjective,  the  mental  and  the 
extra-mental,  are  not  contradictory  of  each  other,  or  opposed 
to  each  other  in  the  facts  of  human  knowledge.  The  rather 
must  it  be  recognized  that  what  corresponds  to  both  these 
classes  of  terms  equally  belongs  to,  and  is  equally  necessary 
to,  the  explanation  of  the  very  concept  of  experience. 

For  let  this  concept  of  experience  be  examined  with  a  view 
to  see  what  it  necessarily  implies.  In  beginning  the  examina- 
tion, the  term  may  be  considered  in  its  widest  possible  signi- 
fication. When  employing  the  word  "  Experience  "  in  its  most 
inclusive  meaning,  we  are  wont  to  think  under  it  everything 
in  any  way  concerned  with  human  consciousness,  —  whether 
as  fact,  condition,  law,  or  implicate.  But  in  forming  the  very 
conception  of  itself,  experience  has  already  transcended  itself. 
The  fact  of  consciousness  — or  rather,  consciousness  considered 
as  fact,  as  being  just  what  it  here-and-now  is  for  me,  and  no 
other  —  is,  from  one  point  of  view,  all  that  there  ever  is  of 
my  present  actual  experience.  Let  this  fact  be  exalted  to  the 
highest  pitch  of  excellence,  extended  so  as  to  embrace  the 
widest  possible  content,  and  suffused  with  the  intensest  and 
most  potent  objective  conviction,  still  it  is  a  fact  of  conscious- 
ness —  here,  and  noiv,  and  mine  —  and  no  more.  The  next 


326  EXPERIENCE  AND  THE  TRANSCENDENT 

fact  of  consciousness  will,  in  its  turn,  be  the  sum-total  of  my 
actual  experience  regarded  as  an  empirically  indisputable  fact ; 
and  so  will  the  next,  and  the  next,  as  long  as  the  stream  of 
consciousness  I  call  myself  continues  to  flow.  And  as  to  the 
"  experience  of  the  race,"  so  long  as  the  same  point  of  view  is 
maintained,  it  is  but  a  fact  of  my  imagination  —  another  fact 
absorbing  the  entire  experience  of  an  individual  consciousness, 
somewhere  and  at  some  definite  time.  Now,  from  the  point 
of  view  of  the  advocate  of  empiricism,  strictly  limited  and 
consistently  retained,  this  is  all  that  can  ever  be  made  out  of 
the  concept  of  experience.  But  this  is  not  at  all  the  concept 
of  experience  as  formed  and  contended  for  by  the  empiricist ; 
and  he  is  as  quick  as  any  one  to  see,  when  it  comes  his  turn 
of  advantage,  that  such  a  concept  is  self-contradictory  and 
obviously  and  scandalously  absurd.  For  such  a  concept  of 
experience  can  not  so  frame  and  hold  itself  together  as  to 
maintain  its  integrity  for  a  moment  in  the  field  of  philosophical 
contention.  Even  the  concept  of  ghosts  has  more  of  flesh- 
and-blood  reality,  and  is  better  worth  fighting  for  than  is  such 
a  concept  as  this.  For,  in  truth,  to  say  " concept" — just  that 
and  nothing  more  —  implies  the  continuity  of  the  conceiving 
subject,  some  sort  of  continuity  and  conditionated  existence 
for  things,  and  some  standard  of  judgment  and  authority  in 
other  conceiving  subjects.  But  here  is  a  mighty  host  of  tran- 
scendent beings  already  intrenched  in  the  empiricist's  camp.1 
No  class  of  men,  among  psychologists  or  philosophers,  in- 
sists more  upon  carefully  observing  and  studying  the  con- 
ditions of  experience  than  do  the  empiricists  themselves. 
Ordinarily,  too,  the  particular  kind  of  conditions  which  they 
think  it  best  worth  while  to  study  are  of  the  most  recondite 
and  unapproachable  kind.  With  the  critical  epistemology  of 
Kant  and  the  neo-Kantians,  they  will  have  nothing  to  do ; 

1  For  a  concrete  instance  of  the  desperate  condition  to  which  such  empiricism 
reduces  one,  see  the  examination  of  M.  Flournoy's  case,  in  Philosophy  of  Mind, 
pp.  28  f. 


EXPERIENCE   AND  THE  TRANSCENDENT  327 

indeed,  they  cherish  for  it  secretly,  if  not  openly,  no  little 
contempt.  As  to  the  uncritical  apriorism  of  Hegel  and  the 
neo-Hegelians,  they  are  quite  unable  to  speak  contemptuously 
enough.  As  empiricists,  they  propose  to  confine  themselves, 
and  all  of  us,  to  a  study  of  experience,  as  actual  matter  of 
observable  fact  and  as  reposing  upon  matter-of-fact  condi- 
tions.1 These  conditions,  however,  are  only  such  as  physio- 
logical and  physical  science  can  handle  and  verify;  they 
consist  in  antecedent  and  concomitant  brain-states,  or  in 
other  physical  changes  which,  flowing  in  upon  man's  stream 
of  consciousness,  if  not  wholly  accountable  for  its  existence 
as  a  conscious  stream,  determine  what  the  factors  and  the 
direction  of  it  all  shall  be.  Who  does  not  see,  however,  that 
the  very  assumption  of  any  sort  of  conditions  for  our  experi- 
ence, which  are  not  present  in  the  concrete  and  actual  ex- 
periences as  conscious  facts,  shows  the  mind  to  itself  as  already 
transcending  experience  ?  Let  no  one  fail  at  this  crucial  point 
to  comprehend  the  question  at  issue  and  the  significance  for 
its  answer,  of  the  procedure  of  every  mind,  whether  it  be  com- 
mitted to  the  baldest  empiricism  or  to  the  most  high-and-dry 
apriorism.  This  question  does  not  refer  to  the  admissibility 
or  adequacy  of  any  particular  order  or  kind  of  the  conditions 
of  experience.  The  question  refers  rather  to  the  significance 
and  validity  of  the  assumption  that  the  present  experience  has 
any  conditions  at  all.  That  some  of  the  conditions  of  human 
experience  are  physiological  and  physical,  or  even  that  all  of 
them  are  such,  may  be  admitted  by  the  opponent  of  a  con- 
sistent empiricism  as  cheerfully  and  safely  as  by  its  most 
determined  advocate.  No  psychoses  without  antecedent  or 
concomitant  brain-states ;  or  all  psychoses  are  only  epi- 
phenomena,  mere  successive  steam-clouds  "  thrown  off  "  from 
and  floating  above  the  brain,  —  if  you  now  will.  For  this  is 

1  Among  other  significant  failures  due  to  the  effort  to  get  the  necessary  as- 
sumptions while  refusing  to  reckon  with  their  origin  or  significance,  see  Pro- 
fessor Fullerton's  Address,  Psychological  Review,  January,  1897. 


328  EXPERIENCE   AND   THE   TRANSCENDENT 

not  the  question  at  issue ;  namely,  What  are  the  most  impor- 
tant and  effective  conditions  of  human  experience  ?  The 
question  is  rather :  Why  does  the  concept  of  experience,  for 
all  men,  itself  include  conditions  that  transcend  the  individual 
experience  ?  Why  is  the  concept  of  an  unconditioned  experi- 
ence, of  an  experience  containing  all  its  grounds  within  itself, 
an  absurd  and  even  impossible  affair  for  the  human  mind  to 
attempt  to  contemplate  ? 

Of  course,  it  may  at  once  be  claimed,  and  correctly,  that 
these  assumed  conditions  of  every  present  experience,  as  facts 
of  consciousness,  have  in  some  form  themselves  previously 
been  matters  of  present  cognitive  experience.  Last  of  all 
men  would  the  most  thorough  empiricists  be,  to  place  the 
conditions  of  experience  where  they  could  themselves,  in  no 
sort,  be  verified  by  experience.  In  the  particular  case  under 
consideration,  some  of  our  past  experiences  have  themselves 
consisted  of  conscious  facts  appertaining  to  the  brain  and  to 
its  states,  and  to  the  other  physiological  and  physical  condi- 
tions of  human  experience.  Fortunately,  moreover,  not  a  few 
of  these  conditions  admit  of  being  repeatedly  observed  under 
such  circumstances  as  to  provide  checks  for  mistaken  specu- 
lative inferences ;  some  of  them  admit  of  frequent  or  occa- 
sional experimental  determination.  So  that  the  inference 
of  other  conditions,  which  are  not  obviously  implicated  in  the 
present  experience,  is  very  far  from  being  an  effort  or  a 
claim  to  transcend  all  experience.  On  the  contrary,  it  is 
sticking  fast  by  the  lines,  and  dealing  with  the  facts,  of  ex- 
perience only  :  it  is  mental  consistency  within  the  fixed  lines 
of  our  empirical  destiny. 

Now,  such  a  view  is,  we  suspect,  not  really  all  that,  or  pre- 
cisely what,  the  empiricist  originally  meant  when  he  proclaimed 
his  confidence  in  brain-states  as  affording  the  conditions  of  this 
and  of  all  human  conscious  experience.  It  is  likely  that  no 
one  would  more  quickly  resent  the  charge  of  proclaiming  a 
theory  of  materialism,  or  of  psycho-physical  parallelism,  or 


EXPERIENCE  AND  THE   TRANSCENDENT  329 

indeed  any  other  theory  merely  in  the  interests  of  his  own 
mental  consistency.  The  truth  is,  that  the  epistemological 
view  of  his  own  meaning  and  intention  comes  to  such  a  thinker 
only  when  he  finds  himself  driven  into  a  corner  by  the  pres- 
sure of  questions  for  an  explanation  of  experience  itself  in  a 
thorough-going  empirical  way.  Really  he  means  that  an 
actual  system  of  things,  a  brain,  etc.,  most  of  which  never 
has  got,  and  never  will  get,  into  his  own  or  any  other  man's 
experience,  must  be  assumed  in  order  to  explain  every  fact 
of  his  experience  in  particular,  and  in  general,  all  human 
experience.  But  this  is  just  the  meaning  upon  which  we  are 
insisting  at  the  present  time.  And  the  same  searching 
question  recurs :  Why  is  a  conditionless  experience  absurd  ? 
Why  does  experience,  in  order  to  explain  itself,  need  to  tran- 
scend itself  as  mere  fact  ?  And  if  the  very  nature  of  experi- 
ence is  such  as  to  render  it  incapable  of  realization  as  a  mere 
fact,  tormented  with  the  actual  limits  set  for  it  and  unable  to 
conceive  of  itself  without  transcending  itself,  why  should  we 
compare  it  to  a  closed  circle  or  to  an  island  in  an  impenetrable 
ocean  ?  If  one  must  employ  spatial  and  "  thing-like  "  figures 
of  speech,  would  not  one  speak  truer  to  the  facts  if  one  said : 
The  very  nature  of  experience  is  perpetually  to  transcend 
itself,  both  for  its  own  explanation  and  for  its  fuller  realiza- 
tion ?  In  cognition  always,  as  soon  as  we  inquire  critically 
into  its  grounds  and  its  significance,  we  see  the  mind  leaping 
beyond  its  present  limits  into  the  real  world  that  is  unseen 
and  unrecognized  by  any  present  act  of  consciousness. 

Suppose,  now,  that  the  effort  be  made  to  construct  a  sci- 
entifically defensible  conception  of  the  conditions  of  all  human 
experience,  both  that  of  the  entire  race  of  men  now  in  ex- 
istence and  also  that  of  the  race  of  men  (and,  if  it  please 
you,  of  their  ape-like  ancestors)  since  its  first  origins  upon 
the  face  of  the  earth.  Can  this  effort  be  made  in  any  wise 
successful  without  freely  bringing  what  is  properly  trans- 
cendent within  the  circle ;  or  without  overleaping  the  circle, 


330  EXPERIENCE  AND  THE  TRANSCENDENT 

and  so,  by  some  act  of  belief,  inference,  or  postulate,  reach- 
ing the  embrace  of  the  transcendent  ?  By  no  manner  of 
means.  And  the  more  bold  in  the  use  of  its  resources,  and 
rich  in  content,  the  scientific  treatment  of  man's  nature  and 
history  becomes,  the  more  does  the  concept  of  human  experi- 
ence, taken  as  a  totality,  include  factors,  faiths,  inferences, 
postulates,  which  transcend  all  present  experience.  The  cry 
of  physics  to  beware  of  metaphysics,  and  the  wailing  of  an- 
thropology to  free  itself  from  ontology,  have  their  answer  in 
the  facts  of  science  as  dependent  upon  the  nature  of  all  knowl- 
edge. There  is  no  science  of  physics  without  metaphysics  ; 
there  is  no  anthropology  without  ontology.  A  purely  "  em- 
pirical "  science  is  not  a  ne-plus-ultra  but  a  nonentity  and  an 
absurdity.  For  science  itself  consists  in  the  discovery  some- 
how of  the  "  conditions  "  upon  which  the  present  facts  of  ex- 
perience may  reasonably  be  supposed  to  have  come  to  be 
facts  at  all ;  nor  is  the  most  scientific  concept  of  experience 
itself  different  as  respects  its  origin,  character,  or  obligations, 
to  the  transcendent.  Tracing  this  concept  steadily  backward 
and  outward,  we  are  obliged,  in  the  interests  of  that  very 
science  which  boasts  itself  to  be  founded  only  upon  experi- 
ence, to  pursue  the  path  of  the  following  assumption :  My 
present  experience,  as  a  fact,  has  its  conditions  lying  outside 
of  itself.  These  conditions  are  partly  in  my  bodily  organism, 
and,  especially  in  that  part  of  it  of  which  I  have  had  no  ex- 
perience, —  in  my  brain  and  central  nervous  system.  They 
are  also,  partly,  in  my  past  mental  operations  as  productive 
of  tendencies  and  habits ;  and  these  conditions,  too,  very 
largely  lie  outside  of  any  experience  which  I  have  ever  had 
or  can  ever  hope  to  have.  What  is  true  of  my  present  ex- 
perience is  emphatically  true  of  the  totality  of  my  experi- 
ence. Its  conditions  are  physical,  and  belong  to  the  great 
world  of  nature  which  lies  outside  my  experience ;  they  are 
also  biological  and  sociological,  and  so  dependent  not  only 
upon  the  collective  experience  of  the  race  but  also  upon  many 


EXPERIENCE  AND  THE   TRANSCENDENT  331 

conditions  of  which  this  collective  experience  has  afforded  no 
mental  representation  to  any  member  of  the  race.  This  col- 
lective experience  of  the  race,  together  with  all  its  concom- 
itant conditions,  whether  physical  or  psychical,  and  with 
its  so-called  laws  of  heredity  and  variation  and  of  modify- 
ing relations  to  environment,  etc.,  is  still  further  scientifically 
conceived  of  only  as  having  conditions  which  transcend  itself. 
And  no  one  is  more  forward  and  confident  in  the  matter  of 
transcending  present  facts  (this  charmed  circle  of  human 
experience)  than  is  the  ardent  defender  of  the  mental  propri- 
ety of  sticking  fast  by  the  facts.  But  he  evinces  on  that 
account  the  more  forcibly  the  truth  of  our  position  :  The 
concept  of  experience  itself  cannot  be  framed  without  includ- 
ing within  itself,  "  momenta "  which  transcend  its  bounds. 
In  other  words,  what  sets  out  to  be  a  purely  empirical  theory, 
with  reference  to  the  nature  of  experience,  cannot  explain 
itself  without  passing  out  of,  and  so  confuting,  itself. 

Shall  we,  then,  admit  this  self-contradictory  nature  of  all 
experience  in  proof  of  the  fact  that  we  cannot  critically  ex- 
amine and  so  know  what  we  are  really  about  in  having  cog- 
nitive experience  without  discovering  how  much  actually 
enters  into  it,  of  blind  inference,  of  unexplained  faith,  of  pos- 
tulating of  unexperienced  entities,  etc.  ?  Precisely  so,  for  this 
is,  in  part,  what  we  desired  to  make  clear.  But  only  in 
part.  The  real  trouble  with  the  advocate  of  an  empiricism 
which  tries  to  conceive  of  human  experience  as  a  closed  cir- 
cle, from  which  the  transcendent  is  forever  excluded,  is  this : 
he  does  not  understand  himself.  He  would  have  a  sci- 
ence, if  he  had  his  own  way  epistemologically,  which  involved 
no  real  thinking  and  no  completed  perception  or  self-con- 
sciousness, —  not  science  at  all,  but  scarcely  a  logically  con- 
sistent dream,  or  a  vision  of  an  insane  mind.1  But  if  "  science  " 

1  As  Volkelt  truly  says  (Erfahrung  und  Denken,  p.  75,  note)  in  criticism  of 
Goring,  "one  of  the  most  radical  of  the  defenders  of  pure  experience"  (see 
his  articles  in  the  Vierteljahrsschrift  fur  wissenschaflliche  Philosophic  ;  1877,  iv., 


332  EXPERIENCE  AND  THE  TRANSCENDENT 

means  knowledge,  then  it  is  necessarily  not  of  the  merely 
subjective,  but  of  the  trans-subjective,  too.  And  the  logically 
established  system  of  existing  beings,  actual  forces,  and  real 
relations,  conceived  of  as  occurring  in  time  and  space,  and  so 
forming  necessary  conditions  of  all  human  experience,  is  the 
transcendent.  Modern  empirical  science  is  certainly  far 
enough  from  reducing  all  this  to  the  "  trans-subjective  mini- 
mum" as  a  sort  of  postulated  plus  lying  outside  of  experience. 
On  the  contrary,  it  goes  on  heaping  up  its  tremendous  de- 
mands upon  faith  to  the  verge  of  a  most  irrational  credulity, 
and  postulating  its  own  grounds  in  a  speculative  scheme  of 
entities  whose  very  nature  is  fast  reaching  the  utmost  stretch 
of  imagination  this  side  the  grotesque  and  the  absurd.  Who 
would  not  undertake  to  remain  within  the  limits  of  experi- 
ence and  believe  in  angels  rather  than  in  ether ;  in  God  rather 
than  in  atoms  ;  and  in  the  history  of  his  Kingdom  as  a 
divine  self-revelation  rather  than  in  the  physicist's  or  biolo- 
gist's purely  mechanical  process  of  evolution  ?  But  why  should 
students  of  science  express  themselves  as  though  Kant  had 
never  written,  or  critical  philosophy  exposed  the  nakedness 
of  their  own  most  cherished  metaphysics  ?  Why  should  they 
not  rather  see  that,  if  thinking  enters  into  experience  to  con- 
vert it  into  a  system  of  cognitions,  experience  must  somehow 
involve  the  transcendent  ?  For  thinking,  as  a  function,  when 
it  demands  assent  to  itself  as  valid  for  reality,  is  eo  ipso  a 
postulating  of  what  is  not  concrete  matter-of-fact  experience. 
The  concept  of  experience  which  was  presented  by  the 
great  critic  and  destroyer  of  empiricism  is  itself,  however, 
inconsistent  and  inadequate.  The  "  island "  of  Kant  is  as 
mythical  as  is  the  circle  of  the  modern  empiricist.  For  let  it 
be  supposed  that  universal  objective  validity  is  imparted  to 
experience  only  because  all  experience  comes  under  the  con- 

352  f.,  and  1878,  i.,  108,  114).  in  this  meaning  of  the  word,  "  I  may  twist  and  turn 
experience  as  I  will,  and  yet  I  can  never  get  anything  else  out  of  it  alone,  ex- 
cept that  it  shows  to  me  processes  in  my  own  consciousness." 


EXPERIENCE  AND  THE   TRANSCENDENT  383 

structive  or  regulative  influence  of  the  a  priori,  or  constitu- 
tional forms  of  the  functioning  of  understanding;  and  that 
from  this  critical  discovery  the  conclusion  is  drawn  of  man's 
inability  to  reach  the  transcendent.  Experience  is  now,  in- 
deed, rendered  objective ;  and  sure  tests  are  supplied  by 
which  to  discriminate  between  dreams  and  cognitions.  Now 
the  limits  of  knowledge,  although  no  longer  set  by  sense,  but 
by  the  unchanging  and  necessary  laws  of  human  intellectual 
faculty,  are  all  the  more  close-fitting  and  irremovable.  Em- 
piricism is  forever  rendered  hors  du  combat ;  and  to  the  object 
of  our  thought  is  given,  so  that  it  can  never  be  taken  away,  a 
"  phenomenal  reality."  But  a  real  reality  —  if  one  may  be 
pardoned  for  finding  one's  self  forced  to  a  coinage  of  such 
uncouth  inscription  —  lies  still  beyond  all  limits  of  experi- 
ence ;  nor  are  these  limits  the  less,  but  rather  the  more  in- 
flexible, because  they  now  have  their  source  in  the  intellect 
itself  rather  than  in  any  of  the  physical  or  biological  condi- 
tions of  sensuous  intuition.  How  now,  indeed,  shall  this 
caged  bird, "  knowledge,"  escape  from  its  cage  "  experience  "  ? 
—  since  the  material  of  the  cage  is  the  more  impassable  and 
entangling  because  invisible  to  the  prisoner. 

We  maintain  that  the  concept  of  experience  which  empha- 
sizes its  internal  laws  rather  than  its  exterior  conditions, 
is  equally  inadequate,  quite  as  self-contradictory  and  absurd 
as  the  concept  of  the  empiricist.  For  how  am  I  —  or  if  I 
am  too  poor  a  thinker,  how  is  the  stalwart  critic  Kant  — 
to  know,  or  even  to  conceive  of  "  laws  "  as  a  priori  forms  of 
experience,  without  transcending  experience  ?  The  impossi- 
bility is  so  patent  as  scarcely  to  need  detailed  exposure. 
Only  by  reflection  can  the  mind  form  any  conception  of  itself 
as  subject  to  laws  set  fast  in  its  own  constitution.  Laws 
are  only  the  more  or  less  frequently  repeated  and  uniform 
modes  of  the  behavior  of  things.  In  this  case  the  particular 
thing,  upon  whose  customary  modes  of  behavior  reflection  is 
required,  is  the  Self  as  consciously  known  to  itself.  But  how 


334  EXPERIENCE  AND  THE  TRANSCENDENT 

large  an  amount  of  the  transcendent  (the  "  trans-subjective 
minimum  ")  is  involved  in  the  origin  and  growth  of  the  cogni- 
tion of  Self  has  already  been  made  the  principal  subject  of  our 
epistemological  inquiry.  A  critical  science  of  mind,  compe- 
tent to  speak  of  "laws,"  etc.,  cannot  escape  the  necessity  of 
including  at  least  this  trans-subjective  minimum  in  its  con- 
ception of  human  experience. 

But,  indeed,  the  Kantian  conception  of  experience  included 
much  more.  For  it  was  not  his  experience,  not  the  experience 
of  the  local  celebrity  of  the  little  town  of  Konigsberg,  which 
Kant  thought  of  as  giving  laws  to  itself.  This  profound  and 
patient  thinker  attempted  to  discern  the  immutable  laws  of 
all  human  experience,  the  very  God-given  or  otherwise  orig- 
inally fixed  constitution  under  which  all  human  selves  have 
done,  are  doing,  and  will  continue  to  do,  their  work  of  thinking 
and  cognizing  one  another  and  all  external  things.  But  how 
can  such  a  conception  be  framed  unless  experience  is  of  itself 
inclusive,  rather  than  exclusive,  of  the  transcendent  ? 

Here,  again,  it  is  vain  and  quite  misses  the  true  significance 
of  the  question  to  reply  that,  after  all,  Kant  was  only  ex- 
plaining his  own  experience  in  terms  derived  from  itself. 
For  in  this  case,  too,  the  original  inquiry  recurs,  and  with 
redoubled  force  :  Whence  comes  the  impulse  and  the  felt  ne- 
cessity thus  to  explain  my  experience  by  appeal  to  a  standard 
of  universal  authority  ?  And  how  does  it  happen  that  this 
standard,  not  only  is  found,  but  in  order  to  explain  my 
experience  must  be  found,  in  the  existence  of  a  system  of 
interrelated  beings  whose  minds  eternally  and  necessarily 
function  as  I  discover  my  own  mind  to  function  ?  The  only 
possible  answer  to  these  questions  involves  an  inference,  a 
postulate,  a  faith,  that  transcends  all  experience  in  order  to 
explain,  to  control,  and  to  validate  it  all.  For  knowledge,  as 
such  and  essentially  considered,  implies  the  existence  of  uni- 
versal rational  consciousness,  as  an  objective  standard -of  truth. 
The  "  laws "  of  intellect  can  no  more  be  accounted  for  than 


EXPERIENCE  AND  THE  TRANSCENDENT  335 

can  its  conditions,  without  the  ontological  assumption  of 
other  intellect  which  can  never  come  into  my  experience 
except  as  my  experience  transcends  what  are,  strictly  speak- 
ing, its  own  bounds. 

It  is  time,  however,  to  drop  from  our  argument  the  figure 
of  speech  that  has  hitherto  been  employed  in  order  to  correct 
the  very  fallacies  to  which  it  so  persistently  gives  rise.  Cer- 
tainly enough,  I  cannot  know  without  knowing.  I  cannot 
know  aught  that  is  not  somehow  implicate  —  either  as  fact, 
condition,  law,  or  entity  —  in  my  experience.  But  these 
truths  do  not  at  all  warrant  the  critic  in  regarding  experience 
as  constructed  after  the  pattern  of  a  closed  circle,  or  of  an 
island  with  rocky  barriers  raised  toward  an  ocean  of  impene- 
trable fog  and  mist.  For  the  real  relations  of  experience  to 
the  transcendent  are  not  of  this  order.  The  rather,  if  we 
preserve  the  figure  of  speech,  must  the  truth  be  expressed  by 
representing  the  mind,  in  all  its  cognitive  activity,  as  perpet- 
ually leaping  beyond  itself,  and  somehow  transcending  its 
own  circuits  by  discovering  within  them  the  potent  presence 
of  other-being  than  its  self-closed  Self.  Or,  if  we  prefer  the 
Kantian  figure  of  speech,  we  must  regard  each  inhabitant  of 
the  before-mentioned  island  as  finding  that  the  surrounding 
fog  and  mist  lift  upward  and  sweep  backward,  and  as  discov- 
ering in  the  ocean  only  another  and  larger  home  for  his  own 
cognitive  soul.  For  the  true  meaning  of  both  figures  of 
speech  is  this :  without  actually  reaching  and  grasping,  by  all 
those  potencies  of  the  soul  which  cognition  involves,  the  real 
conditions,  universal  laws,  and  related  entities  of  the  Self 
and  of  Things,  we  cannot  even  form  the  concept  of  human 
experience.  What  these  conditions  are,  psychology  and  epis- 
temology  unite  to  discover,  describe,  and  criticise.  What 
these  laws  are — how  they  arise  and  get  validity  of  applica- 
tion, and  what  we  mean  by  them  —  the  two  chapters  preced- 
ing this  have  already  partially  discussed.  Further  discussion 
will  bring  before  us  the  nature  of  Truth  and  Error,  the  alleged 


336  EXPERIENCE  AND  THE   TRANSCENDENT 

Antinomies  of  Reason,  and  the  Limits  and  Justification  of 
Scepticism,  of  Agnosticism,  and  of  Criticism  in  Epistemology. 
The  ontological  Implicates  are  now  about  to  be  examined. 

We  pause  a  moment  to  snatch  a  practical  suggestion  from 
this  study  for  an  epistemological  theory.  It  seems  that  he  who 
would  be  so  cautious  about  knowledge  as  not  to  trust  himself 
beyond  the  strictest  limits  of  his  own  little  mental  domain, 
may  end  by  becoming  the  most  credulous  and  childish  of  men. 
To.  think  that  "  cock-sure "  confidence  in  empirical  science 
alone  should  end  in  complete  despair  of  all  science !  To  find 
that,  when  we  hedge  in  so  carefully  our  laboratory,  and  light 
it  with  the  latest  electrical  apparatus  of  the  highest  candle- 
power,  it  should  still,  to  the  spiritually  enlightened  eyes,  seem 
full  of  fanciful  sprites,  thick  with  the  ghosts  of  a  metaphysics 
which  nineteenth-century  positivism  and  agnosticism  have 
pledged  themselves  to  expel !  Shall  we  then  steal,  silent  and 
despairing,  into  the  dark  forests  of  a  total  agnosticism,  or 
run  shrieking  to  the  mad-house  where  untamed  imagination 
and  irrational  feeling  hold  their  riotous  sway ;  or  shall  we 
set  our  teeth  and  button  up  well  our  overcoats  against  the 
cold  and  go  about  our  business,  resolutely  believing  what  we 
know  to  be  untrue  ?  Perhaps  we  may  find  a  yet  "  more 
excellent  way."  For  it  may  be  that  faith  and  intellect, 
feeling  and  thinking  and  willing,  can  all  be  combined  into  a 
right  attitude  of  our  cognitive  souls  toward  truth,  life,  and 
all  Reality. 


CHAPTER   XII 

THE  IMPLICATES  OF  KNOWLEDGE 

HITHERTO  we  have  been  occupied  with  a  critical  exam- 
ination of  human  cognition,  —  its  nature,  laws,  and 
grounds,  —  with  a  view  to  test  the  validity  of  its  claim  to  be  a 
system  of  mental  representation  framed  and  connected  after 
the  pattern  of  a  really  existent  World.  In  other  words,  we 
have  sought  guaranties  for  Knowledge  in  general ;  and  the 
search  has  been  conducted  in  the  most  presuppositionless  way 
possible.  It  is  now  time  to  reverse  the  terms  of  inquiry  and 
to  ask  ourselves :  What  does  human  knowledge  guarantee  ? 
What  sort  of  Reality  is  validated  for  all  men,  in  the  un- 
changing nature,  necessary  laws,  and  fundamental  grounds 
of  their  own  cognitive  activity  ?  Any  detailed  answer  to  these 
questions  would  furnish  an  elaborate  system  of  ontology,  a 
metaphysical  structure  in  the  narrower  meaning  of  the  word 
"  metaphysics."  But  epistemological  discussion  aims  at  ruling 
out  ontology  so  far  as  the  process  of  exclusion  is  possible,  or, 
at  most,  convenient.  The  truth  of  the  admission  made  early 
in  our  discussion  has  been  growing  constantly  more  apparent ; 
the  philosophy  of  Knowledge  and  the  philosophy  of  Reality, 
epistemology  and  ontology,  offer  problems  that  cannot  be 
kept  wholly  apart;  for  these  problems  are  only  different 
aspects  or  stages  of  one  and  the  same  problem. 

No  one  need  fear,  however,  that  the   standpoint   of  free 
criticism  is  now  wholly  to  be  abandoned,  or  that  a  system  of 
ontological  metaphysics  is  about  to  be  introduced  under  pre- 
22 


338  THE   IMPLICATES   OF   KNOWLEDGE 

tence  of  having  already  sufficiently  guaranteed  the  power  of 
our  cognitive  faculties  to  construct  such  a  system.  This  task 
we  wish,  as  far  as  possible,  to  reserve  for  another  time.  For 
the  proposed  change,  in  our  point  of  view,  is  here  introduced 
in  the  interests  of  the  thoroughness  of  our  criticism.  This 
will  appear  clearly  as  soon  as  the  bearing  of  the  conclusions 
already  reached  upon  the  further  pursuit  of  epistemological 
problems  is  considered.  It  has  been  shown  by  a  searching 
criticism  of  the  very  act  of  cognition  —  of  that  fundamental 
datum,  "  I  know,"  in  which  the  problem  of  epistemology  orig- 
inates—  that  no  guaranty  of  a  character  external  to  the 
act  itself  can  possibly  be  produced.  All  the  validity  that 
knowledge  can  attain,  theoretically,  consists  in  its  being  what 
it  actually  is,  namely,  knowledge,  and  not  a  mere  having  of 
states  of  consciousness,  of  whatever  sort  or  howsoever 
arranged  and  combined.  But,  then,  it  has  also  been  shown 
that  knowledge,  ultimately  considered,  validates  itself ;  and 
that  it  does  this  in  such  a  way  as  to  leave  nothing  further  to 
be  desired  or  even  to  be  conceived  of  as  possible.  It  does  this 
so  as  to  guarantee,  for  the  cognizing  Self,  its  own  real  existence 
and  nature  as  a  Self ;  and  so  as  also  to  guarantee  that  other 
beings,  actually  known  as  not-selves,  exist,  and  what  they 
are ;  but  this  latter,  only  if  we  may  accept  as  valid  the 
assumption  that  things  share  in  the  qualifications  which  the 
Self  knows  itself  to  possess.  Now,  plainly,  it  is  a  legitimate 
and  indispensable  extension  of  the  epistemological  doctrine 
already  established,  when  we  enter  a  little  way  into  the  fur- 
ther critical  examination  of  these  qualifications  themselves. 
This,  then,  is  the  problem  now  before  us.  What  sort  of  a 
being  is  guaranteed  for  the  really  existent  World  by  our 
exercise  of  cognitive  faculty  in  its  own  constitutional  and 
supremely  self-confident  way  ?  What,  in  brief  but  more  pre- 
cisely than  they  have  hitherto  been  distinguished,  are  the 
Implicates  of  all  Knowledge  ? 

In  answering  this  question,  it  is  our  aim  to  remain  as  cau- 


THE  IMPLICATES   OF  KNOWLEDGE  339 

tious  and  even  austere  toward  all  claimants  to  a  title  to 
a-priority  as  we  have  all  the  while  been.  We  are,  indeed, 
the  advocates  of  a  certain  "  faith-philosophy, "  and  determined 
opponents  of  the  unwarrantable  Kantian  separation  of  faith 
and  knowledge ;  but  we  are  not  unmindful  of  Schopenhauer's 
sarcasm  as  directed  against  Jacobi,  "  Who  only  has  the  tri- 
fling weakness  that  he  takes  all  he  learned  and  approved 
before  his  fifteenth  year  for  inborn  ideas  of  the  human  mind." 
Nor  can  Kant  himself  be  cleared  of  the  charge  of  multiplying 
unnecessarily  the  formal  factors  and  laws  necessary  to  give 
an  account  of  the  origin  and  nature  of  cognition.  Let  us  aim, 
however,  at  moderation.  It  is  not  the  farthest  possible 
extension  of  ontological  implicates  of  human  knowledge 
which  seems  alluring  just  now ;  it  is  rather  the  critical  esti- 
mate of  what  has  been  called  the  "  trans-subjective  minimum" 
Such  implicates  as  appear  of  this  order  will  certainly  be 
amply  able  to  bear  those  final  attacks  of  scepticism  and 
agnosticism  to  which  they  will  then  be  subjected. 

That  the  trans-subjective  —  some  being  other  than  the  here- 
and-now  being  of  the  state  of  consciousness,  objectively  de- 
termined —  is  implicated  in  every  concrete  act  of  cognition,  has 
been  found  to  be  both  postulated  and  proved,  or  evinced  by  all 
actual  examples.  On  the  one  hand,  phenomenalism  belongs  to 
the  very  nature  of  knowledge  ;  for  "  we  can  cognize  any  object 
only  as  it  manifests  itself  in  our  consciousness,  or  as  it  appears 
to  us  to  be."  On  the  other  hand,  the  ontological  nature  of 
knowledge  is  equally  apparent :  it  is  even  much  more  appar- 
ent ;  for  it  is  the  peculiarity  of  cognition,  that  what  is  not  con- 
sciousness, what  transcends  the  mental  act  of  representation, 
appears  in  consciousness  as  inseparable  from  this  act.  The 
critical  doctrine  of  the  ontological  implicates  of  knowledge  is, 
therefore,  a  necessary  part  of  the  theory  of  knowledge.  Tin's 
doctrine  may  be  established  in  the  form  of  an  attempted 
answer  to  a  problem ;  and  to  borrow  from  mathematics  a 
figure  of  speech,  the  nature  of  this  problem  may  be  sugges- 


340  THE  IMPLICATES  OF  KNOWLEDGE 

tively  expressed  in  the  following  way :  What  is  the  value  of 
the  X  (the  real  Being)  which  is  actually  found  implicate  in 
every  act  of  knowledge  ? 

Students  of  Kant  are  well  aware  that  he  vacillated  and  gave 
different  and  doubtful  answers  to  the  ontological  problem.  In 
a  general  way  he  attempted  its  answer  in  terms  of  a  concep- 
tion answering  to  the  words  "  Ding-an-sich"  or  "  Gregenstcinde 
iiberhaupt "  ("  Thing-in-itself,"  or  "  Objects  in  general  "  and 
not  specifically  determined  as  concrete  objects  of  actual  cog- 
nition). But  the  Kantian  conception  of  "  Thing-in-itself " 
admits  of  no  satisfactory  description  ;  neither  can  it  be  made 
to  agree  with  the  terms  of  the  fundamental  and  unassailable 
formula,  "  I  know,"  as  this  formula  asserts  and  vindicates 
itself  in  every  actual  performance  of  the  faculty  of  cognition. 
No  negative  and  merely  limiting  conception  can  be  substi- 
tuted for  the  X  of  the  problem,  in  such  a  way  as  to  solve  the 
difficulties  which  the  X  of  actual  experience  offers.  The 
being  of  the  X  of  experience  is  not  an  abstraction  ;  nor  is  it 
a  bare  so-called  "  act-of-positing,"  or  a  mere  law  of  intellect 
functioning  under  the  categories  of  substantiality  and  caus- 
ality. The  refutation  which  every  cognitive  experience  brings 
against  this  interpretation  of  the  Kantian  formula  has  already 
been  sufficiently  provided.  In  our  cognitive  experience,  the 
reality,  Jf,  does  not  stand  as  the  hypostasis  of  a  limitation, 
actually  experienced  by  the  intellect  in  every  attempt  to 
transcend  its  constitutional  limits. 

What  Kant  (especially  in  the  first  edition  of  the  "  Critique 
of  Pure  Reason  ")  attempted  to  show  as  true  of  the  transcen- 
dent reality  imagined  to  be  in  consciousness  was  true  only  of 
Kant's  own  imagining  and  of  its  abstract  and  unreal  product. 
For  there  is  an  unmistakable  fallacy  involved  in  converting 
the  proposition  "  All  objective  cognition  has  its  source  in  our 
mental  representations  "  into  the  proposition  "  All  objective 
cognition  consists  of  our  mental  representations  "  as  worked 
up  into  abstract  forms  by  the  intellect  functioning  according 


THE  IMPLICATES  OF  KNOWLEDGE  341 

to  its  twelve  constitutional  forms,  the  so-called  categories.1 
This  actual,  concrete  presence  of  the  Being  X,  which  cannot 
be  resolved  into  a  mere  mental  image,  or  into  an  abstraction, 
or  into  a  dialectical  process  striking  against  a  limit,  like  the 
nose  of  the  blind  fish  in  a  small  pool  running  itself  into  the  mud, 
creates  a  demand,  which  epistemology  must  meet,  for  its  own 
further  explication.  The  trans-subjective  is  implicate  in  cog- 
nition ;  it  is  implicate,  of  necessity,  as  positively  there  in  all 
cognition.  It  is  the  transcendent  Real,  present  in  experience, 
whenever  the  life  of  consciousness  becomes  a  completed  act  of 
knowledge. 

Much  has  already  been  discovered,  in  the  course  of  the  fore- 
going critical  discussion  of  knowledge,  which  is  rightly 
alleged  in  answer  to  the  question,  What  is  the  Being  of  X? 
But  what  has  already  been  discovered  only  appears  to  make 
more  desirable  the  task  of  gathering  together  the  scattered 
remarks  and  weaving  them,  if  possible,  into  some  consistent 
whole.  No  other  ta§k  is  more  important  for  the  student  of 
epistemology  than  that  of  examining  further  the  character  and 
determining  the  final  value  of  this  X\  it  is  this  task  which 
builds  for  him  the  bridge  upon  which  he  may  safely  cross  into 
the  otherwise  forbidden  domain  of  ontology.  To  drop  the 
figure  of  speech,  the  implicates  of  all  knowledge  must  be  dis- 
covered, critically  expounded,  and  defended  both  circum- 
stantially and  by  harmonizing  them  with  one  another ;  for  only 
in  this  way  can  the  theoretical  interests  of  a  philosophy  of 
knowledge  and  the  practical  ends  of  conduct  be  attained  and 
conserved. 

A  preliminary  inquiry,  which  is  largely  of  a  psychological 
character,  but  which  has  never  received  the  attention  it  de- 
serves in  psychological  investigation  and  literature,  fitly  pre- 
cedes the  criticism  of  the  ontological  implicates  of  human 
knowledge.  This  inquiry  concerns  the  meaning  of  the  word 
"  implicate,"  in  so  far  as  it  can  properly  be  used  in  this  con- 
1  Compare  Wundt,  System  der  Philosophic,  pp.  184f. 


342  THE  IMPLICATES  OF  KNOWLEDGE 

nection  and  authenticated  by  our  actual  experience.  How  is 
it,  in  fact,  that  Reality  is  caught  and  enfolded,  so  to  speak, 
within  the  ever  flowing  stream  of  man's  conscious  life  ?  Here 
we  are  forced  to  raise  again  the  sceptical  question.  No  fact 
is  surer  than  that  this  "  stream  of  consciousness  "  is  in  a  con- 
dition of  perpetual  flux.  It  is  itself  a  series  of  conscious 
facts,  each  of  which  is  particular,  circumscribed,  and  always 
ascribable  to  some  individual  Ego,  which  is  itself  known  as 
existing  at  all  only  while  this  same  stream  flows  ever  onward. 
In  the  largest  conceivable  significance  of  the  words,  "  my  ex- 
perience "  must  comprehend,  within  some  particular  portion 
of  this  flowing  stream,  all  the  Being  that  there  is  for  me, — 
whether  envisaged  or  ideated,  or  believed  in,  or  postulated,  or 
willed,  or  thought.  Now  the  scepticism  which  follows  from 
the  reflective  consideration  of  this  truth  is  no  new  doctrine ; 
it  is  found  in  every  age  of  the  world  and  in  every  race  that 
has  reflected  in  any  age.  It  appears  as  the  doctrine  of  Maya 
in  the  ancient  East,  and  as  Spencerian  agnosticism  in  the 
modern  West.  The  facts  will  continue  to  breed  such  scepti- 
cism until  the  end  of  the  last  of  all  the  ages. 

Just  as  certain  is  it,  however,  that  certain  facts  exist,  in- 
dubitable and  eternally  potent  and  effective,  within  the  stream 
of  consciousness,  which  check,  limit,  correct,  and  finally  re- 
verse the  tendencies  to  scepticism  and  to  its  termination  in 
agnosticism  or  other  doctrine  of  illusion.  Such  are  all  the 
facts  of  knowledge.  These  must,  indeed,  be  received  as  facts 
in  the  flowing  stream  of  consciousness,  —  as  a  part  of  the  series 
which  is  a  perpetual  flux.  But  as  facts,  they  must  be  received 
in  their  entirety  and  with  their  full,  actual  significance ;  and 
when  this  is  done,  it  becomes  once  for  all  obvious  that,  if  facts 
of  consciousness,  as  such,  are  always  empirical,  some  facts  of 
consciousness,  as  facts  of  knowledge,  are  always  also  "  super- 
empirical."  Or,  to  state  the  truth  in  terms  made  more  ex- 
pressive by  the  discussion  of  the  last  chapter:  It  is  quite 
impossible  even  to  frame  the  conception  of  experience  of  the 


THE  IMPLICATES  OF  KNOWLEDGE  343 

human  sort,  without  introducing  that  which  is  for  us  extra- 
mentally  real  and  which  is  actually  related  to  us,  and  to  itself, 
in  a  variety  of  effective  relations. 

Somehow,  therefore,  Reality  is  indubitably  known  to  be  im- 
plicated in  knowledge.  But  may  we  know  "  how,"  more  par- 
ticularly, this  implication  takes  effect  ?  Or,  to  change  the 
form  of  the  question :  On  what  precise  terms  of  conscious 
recognition,  or  appropriation,  so  to  speak,  is  that  which  exists 
beyond  consciousness  discovered  to  be  "  part  and  parcel "  of 
man's  conscious  and  cognitive  life  ?  Is  it  as  "  envisagement " 
or  as  "  inference,"  as  a  leap  upon  the  staff  of  the  principle 
of  sufficient  reason,  or  as  a  climb  by  more  considerate  pro- 
cesses of  ratiocination  of  a  speculative  order,  as  an  act  of 
faith  in  God,  or  a  rational  postulate,  as  a  blind  instinctive 
grasp,  or  a  deed  of  free  self-assertion,  that  I,  the  conscious 
subject,  reach  my  object,  the  actually  existent,  which  is  be- 
yond my  subjective  state  and  which  is  not  to  be  identified 
with  my  self-conscious  Self  ?  The  true  answer  to  this  in- 
quiry has  already  been  given  in  detail.  But  in  recalling 
that  answer,  it  will  be  helpful  to  consider  briefly  how  the 
same  question  has  been  answered  by  others  who  have  dis- 
cussed it  in  more  or  less  unprejudiced  fashion,  whether  as  a 
matter  chiefly  of  psychological  research  or  as  a  concernment 
of  their  philosophical  systems.  And  here  the  significant  fact 
of  history  is  that  the  answer  has  been  given  in  all  the  above- 
mentioned  different  forms ;  and  in  each  of  them,  over  and 
over  again.  Upon  this  question  the  great  critic  of  cognitive 
faculty  is,  as  has  already  been  said,  vacillating  and  quite  gen- 
erally unsatisfactory.  When  expressing  himself  naively,  and 
yet  under  the  influence  of  his  extreme  doctrine  of  the  separ- 
ability of  form  and  content  as  respects  the  dependence  of 
knowledge  on  reality,  Kant  has  only  to  say,  "  It  is  given." 
Elsewhere  he  would  seem  to  wish  that  we  should  believe ; 
nothing  is  given  but  this  —  that  "  It "  really  is.  That  is  to 
say,  the  bare  Being  of  X  is  received  as  an  act  of  blind  instinc- 


344  THE  IMPLICATES  OF  KNOWLEDGE 

tive  belief  by  the  soul  of  man.  Curiously  enough,  agnostic 
modern  science  is  accustomed  to  declaring,  first  of  all,  "  We 
know  nothing  as  to  what  Matter  really  is  ;•"  and  then  to  pro- 
ceeding with  volumes  of  instruction  about  this  Unknown,  and 
to  speaking  deferentially  of  it  as  a  "  that-which."  Yet,  again, 
Kant  teaches  that  Reality  is  implicate  in  cognition  as  a  nega- 
tive terminal  of  a  process  of  abstraction,  or  as  an  "  Idea " 
which  is  speculatively  pursued  by  the  employment  of  an  illu- 
sory logic,  in  the  mind's  effort  to  unify  the  totality  of  its 
experience. 

On  this  one  point  Schopenhauer  is  undoubtedly  much 
superior  to  Kant,  because  nearer  the  indubitable  and  common 
facts  of  experience.  According  to  the  former,  the  intellect 
proceeds  upon  the  a  priori  principle  of  sufficient  reason  to 
a  kind  of  envisagement,  or  seizure,  of  the  concrete  reality  in 
the  act  of  perception ;  but  of  this  act  of  the  intellect  no 
other  account  or  vindication  is  possible.  Reasoning,  he  thinks, 
never  gives  the  knowledge  of  reality.  Confusion  and  even 
self-contradiction,  however,  afflict  the  different  statements  of 
Schopenhauer  in  answer  to  this  question :  In  what  form  of 
conscious  experience  is  reality  given  to  man  ?  Especially 
is  this  true  of  his  doctrine  of  the  will,  as  immediately  appre- 
hended somehow  without  intellect's  aid,  and  yet  as  the  true 
essence  and  real  being  of  the  individual  Self.  In  Hegel's 
system,  reality  is  assumed  to  be  known  —  both  that  it  is 
and  what  it  is  —  in  a  dialectical  process  which  is,  happily, 
the  very  opposite  in  character  from  the  illusory  dialectic  of 
the  Kantian  epistemology ;  this  process  is,  when  it  under- 
stands itself,  seen  to  be  the  complete  and  only  truly  Existent, 
as  revealed  in  the  consciousness  of  the  individual  man. 

Sully,  James,  and  some  other  modern  psychologists,  have 
agreed  rather  with  the  thought  of  Augustine  and  the  Early 
Church  Fathers,  and  of  the  ecclesiastical  writers  of  the 
Middle  Ages.  It  is  in  the  form  of  "  belief  "  —  not  blind  and 
irrational  but,  as  of  the  very  nature  of  reason  and,  perchance, 


THE  IMPLICATES  OF  KNOWLEDGE  345 

leading  the  mind  out  toward  the  higher  realities,  whose  fuller 
revelation  awaits  the  attitude  of  trust  —  that  reality  finds 
entrance  within  the  stream  of  human  consciousness.  Yet 
others  (as,  for  example,  Riehl)  lay  down  the  doctrine  that, 
somehow,  knowledge  =  thinking  +  reality  ;  but  no  clear  infor- 
mation is  afforded  by  them  as  to  how  the  second  member  of 
the  right-hand  term  of  the  equation  gets  any  place  in  the 
equation  at  all.  And,  alas  !  if  we  may  regret  the  absence  of 
opinions  which  would  probably  only  add  to  the  confusion,  the 
multitude  of  minor  writers  on  psychology  pass  the  problem 
by  in  silence  ;  or  perhaps  they  even  think,  by  skilfully  manip- 
ulating sensations  and  "  fainter  images "  of  sensations,  and 
by  combining  them  under  psycho-physical  formulas,  to  suc- 
ceed in  hiding  the  fact  that  there  is  a  problem  after  all. 
X  is  there,  however ;  and,  "  How  did  it  get  there  ? "  is  a 
question  which  can  neither  be  summarily  dismissed  nor  over- 
looked by  a  generation  scientifically  disposed. 

The  instructive  thing  to  notice  about  all  these  views  is 
that  so  long  as  they  are  positive,  and  yet  confessedly  partial, 
they  are  unanswerable.  They  meet  with  effective  opposition 
only  when  they  claim  to  be  complete  and  so  undertake  to 
deny  or  to  explain  the  facts  upon  which  are  founded  rival 
views.  The  truth  is  that  Reality  is  implicated  in  our  cogni- 
tion in  all  these  different  ways.  First,  it  is  manifest  that 
the  operations  of  the  intellect  imply  and  actually  involve  a 
trans-subjective  world  of  real  things  and  real  minds,  stand- 
ing in  actual  relations.  The  cognitive  judgment  affirms  it ; 
this  is,  indeed,  precisely  what  it  concretely  and  actually  does 
in  order  to  terminate  in  knowledge  any  process  of  thinking. 
All  exercise  of  intellect  implicates  reality,  in  every  effort  to 
give  an  account  to  itself  of  its  own  origin  and  laws  as  an 
activity.  Why  should  I  judge  the  elm-tree  to  be  over 
there ;  and  the  star  to  be  up  yonder  above  my  head  ?  No 
answer  can  be  given,  or  suggested,  for  any  question  like 
this,  except  the  answer :  —  Because  it  is,  and  is,  in  some  true 


346  THE   IMPLICATES  OF   KNOWLEDGE 

meaning  of  the  words,  not  in  my  consciousness,  but  actually 
"  over  there  "  or  "  up  yonder."  The  idealism  which  denies 
the  truthfulness  of  such  judgments,  by  so  reducing  their 
terms  that  they  involve  no  reality  other  than  the  states  of  the 
judging  subject,  convicts  the  intellect  of  a  fundamental  ab- 
surdity. The  intellect  cannot,  and  will  not,  endure  the 
insult  of  that.  So,  too,  as  has  been  abundantly  shown,  all 
conceptual  knowledge  gets  validating  only  as  it  finds  the 
relations  of  reality  involved  in  the  processes  of  conception 
and  of  reasoning.  The  last  "  grounds "  of  all  intellectual 
endeavor  are  reached  in  the  intellect's  self-justification  of 
this  answer  to  its  own  everlasting,  Why  ? —  Because  it  is  so, 
and  this  is  an  end  of  the  controversy.  Moreover,  this  is  all 
the  truth  there  is  in  the  Kantian  or  other  agnostic  doctrine 
that  the  Jf,  the  Real  of  cognition,  is  a  negative  and  limiting 
concept.  It  is  negative  in  that  it  positively  denies  the  right 
and  the  expediency  of  further  sceptical  questioning;  it  is 
limiting  because  it  forbids  the  vain  effort  to  discover  a 
merely  abstract  Ding-an-sich  behind  the  reality  which  is 
actually  involved  in  its  own  life. 

But,  second,  they  are  also  clearly  in  the  right  who  find  all 
the  most  fundamental  feelings  of  the  soul  committed  to  the 
tenure  of  reality  as  known  by  it.  Nor  are  these  feelings 
exhausted  by  speaking  of  them  as  "  faith,"  or  "  belief,"  of 
a  metaphysical  or  ontological  kind.  Feeling  does,  indeed, 
attach  itself  to  the  X  in  such  fashion  that  it  cannot  be  re- 
moved or  shaken  off.  I  believe  in  my  little  real  world,  with 
all  my  might.  It  is  indeed  little  as  compared  with  that 
great  world  whose  vague  conception  floats  alluring  before 
my  mind,  —  beings  physical  and  psychical,  rank  above  rank, 
in  manifold  now  inconceivable  relations,  and  the  great  God 
in,  and  through,  and  over  All.  Now  whether  there  be  any 
such  Great  World  or  not,  I  may  doubt.  But  my  world  is 
very  real  to  me ;  and  I  believe  in  it  with  an  invincible  and 
passionate  faith.  For,  as  a  real  world,  it  has  in  it  those 


THE  IMPLICATES  OF  KNOWLEDGE  347 

with  whom  my  most  quick,  vital,  and  supreme  interests  are 
concerned,  —  the  things  I  own  and  hope  to  gain,  and  above 
all,  the  persons  whom  I  fear,  or  hate,  or  trust,  or  love.  And 
I  do  not  wish  it  reduced  to  a  dream  ;  even  if  it  be  a  very 
logically  consistent  and  scientifically  constructed  dream, 
after  the  pattern  of  an  "  If-this-is-so  —  then-that-is-so,"  but 
without  anybody's  knowing  what  is  really  so.  The  plain 
truth  is  that  men  generally,  however  sceptical  in  regard  to 
a  theory  of  knowledge  or  to  an  ontological  system  they  may 
be,  have  all  their  feelings  in  view  of  what  they  regard  as 
reality.  That  is  to  say,  —  Reality  is  somehow  implicate  in 
the  feelings  of  man,  as  a  cognitive  soul.  And  if  we  recog- 
nize a  peculiar  form  of  ever-present  and  effective  feeling, 
and  call  it  a  general  "  belief  "  in  reality,  a  sort  of  ontological 
faith,  convincing  in  every  concrete  act  of  cognition,  we  do 
not  even  then  seem  to  be  misstating  the  case. 

Nor  can  one  fail  to  notice  that  it  is  almost  impossible  to 
express  the  belief  of  the  cognitive  soul  in  the  reality  of  its 
own  cognitive  products  without  using  words  which  turn  the 
attention  away  from  the  merely  affective  aspects  of  experience. 
"We  will  have  it  so;  and  this  is,  partly,  because  we  know 
that  it  would  be  quite  useless  to  will  otherwise ;  for  there 
is  that  "  other-will "  always  to  be  reckoned  with.  To  know 
the  really  existent  World  —  the  trans-subjective  beings  in 
their  actual  matter-of-fact  relations  —  I  must  will,  indeed ; 
but  I  cannot  know  this  world  purely  as  I  will.  Sow  I 
know  it,  then,  depends  always  upon  felt  and  known  relations 
between  my  will  and  that  real  X  which  is  not-my-will,  but 
which  may  be  the  will  of  some  other  Self  or  non-self  Thing. 

Thus  the  question  as  to  how  Reality  is  implicate  in  con- 
sciousness, when  consciousness  takes  on  the  form  and  assumes 
the  rights  of  completed  cognition,  leads  to  the  same  truth 
which  is  reached  by  an  analysis  of  the  nature  of  cognition. 
It  is  not  as  an  intellectual  leap  or  well  considered  conclusion 
simply,  nor  as  any  kind  of  feeling  merely,  nor  as  a  deed  of 


348  THE  IMPLICATES  OF  KNOWLEDGE 

will,  more  or  less  intelligent,  alone ;  but  it  is  as  all  of  these 
combined,  that  the  real  existence  of  this  Self  and  of  Things 
is  implicate  in  cognition.  Or,  to  invert  the  statement,  the 
entire  complex  condition  of  the  Subject,  in  the  act  of  cogni- 
tion, involves  mid  guarantees  the  Being  of  the  trans-subjective 
existent.  As  envisaged,  judged,  postulated,  believed  in,  felt, 
made  object  of  active  will  and  respondent  in  the  form  of 
reacting  will,  the  Being  of  X  is  "  given  "  to  me,  when  I  have 
that  commerce  with  this  X  which  is  called  knowledge. 

What,  in  particular,  are  the  implicates  found  guaranteed 
by  knowledge,  —  not  as  critically  and  speculatively  treated 
so  as  to  form  a  developed  ontology,  but  as  enumerated  in 
the  constitution  of  that  "  trans-subjective  minimum  "  without 
which  knowledge,  as  a  universal  experience,  is  unintelligible? 
This  question  might  be  put  into  the  language  of  critical  phi- 
losophy, after  the  Kantian  fashion,  as  follows :  To  what 
categories,  in  accordance  with  the  very  nature  of  all  cogni- 
tion, must  transcendent  application  be  assigned  ?  Here  the 
true  position  reverses  the  conclusions  of  Kant.  Since  all 
human  knowledge  has  a  certain  necessary  form,  therefore  a 
body  of  metaphysics,  as  ontology,  is  guaranteed  as  involved  in 
this  knowledge.  For,  without  admitting  certain  ontological 
implicates,  the  most  primary  and  universal  of  our  cognitions 
are  rendered  absurd.  Something  as  to  the  content  of  the 
really  existent  is  interwoven  inextricably  with  the  conscious 
life  of  the  cognitive  subject. 

In  explicating  what  of  an  ontological  character  is  thus 
implicate  in  all  the  subjective  processes  of  cognition,  we 
come  first  upon  the  Being  of  the  Self.  No  language  can 
possibly  state  the  absurdity  of  the  agnosticism  which,  start- 
ing from  the  conscious  facts  of  knowledge,  attempts  to  deny 
reality  to  the  self-conscious  subject  of  knowledge.  A  hidden 
core  of  changeless  existence,  a  "thing-like"  substrate,  at 
which  self-consciousness  can  never  get,  and  which  must  be 
supposed  to  lie  dormant  and  incapable  of  ever  making  itself 


THE  IMPLICATES  OF  KNOWLEDGE  349 

known  beneath  the  so-called  phenomenal  Ego,  may  well 
enough  be  denied.  There  are,  indeed,  no  facts  of  self-knowl- 
edge to  guarantee  a  Kantian  Ding-an-sichheit  for  the  con- 
scious subject  of  those  processes  in  which  the  facts  consist. 
But  that  I  am,  that  I  was,  and  that  I  have  been,  —  a  con- 
scious, living  Self,  —  are  ontological  propositions  which  are 
involved  in  all  my  present  cognitive  experience.  Some  sort 
of  merely  sensuous  or  ideational  existence,  some  dream- 
like being  with  a  certain  show  of  shrewd  intelligence,  might 
be  had  without  establishing  a  right  to  posit  its  own  reality. 
Were  this  the  sum-total  of  man's  accredited  experiences,  his 
metaphysical  postulates  and  beliefs  would,  no  doubt,  be  ex- 
ceedingly meagre,  —  if,  indeed,  any  postulates  and  beliefs 
arose,  for  critical  examination,  above  the  horizon  of  his 
conscious  life.  Beings  that  have  only  a  sensuous  and  image- 
making  experience  have,  probably,  no  "  threshold "  of  an 
ontological  consciousness.  The  metaphysical  credo  of  the 
most  intelligent  of  the  brutes  is,  at  longest,  very  brief.  But 
the  Self  is  a  being  that  knows  —  itself,  and  various  truths 
about  other  selves  and,  as  well,  about  so-called  material 
things.  Moreover,  the  cognitive  life  of  the  Self  is  an  histori- 
cal development.  The  knowledge  of  the  individual  man  is 
a  growth  ;  and  each  new  cognition  is  dependently  connected, 
by  the  principles  of  identity  and  of  sufficient  reason,  and  by 
acts  of  recognitive  memory  and  of  rational  inference,  with 
antecedent  cognitions.  Thus  this  Life  implicates  and  guaran- 
tees its  own  real  existence,  as  that  of  a  Self  developing 
according  to  the  modes  of  its  own  constitution  and  in  ac- 
cordance with  immanent  ideas  peculiar  to  it,  in  a  continuous 
life-history. 

If,  moreover,  the  question  arise,  What  is  this  Being  of 
the  Self,  thus  implicate  and  guaranteed  in  the  unfolding  life 
of  cognition  ?  no  answer  can  be  given  except  that  which 
points  out  the  characteristic  modes  of  doing  and  suffering 
known  as  belonging  to  the  Self.  They  involve  the  "  trans- 


350  THE  IMPLICATES  OF  KNOWLEDGE 

subjective  minimum"  of  every  man's  consciousness,  so  far 
as  this  consciousness  has  reference  to  his  own  reality.  Fur- 
ther speculative  inferences,  or  rational  faiths  and  hopes  and 
fears  referring  to  the  future  being  of  the  soul,  may  find 
ground  for  their  standing  in  this  primary  and  universal  ontol- 
ogy of  the  Self.  But  all  such  inferences  and  faiths  must 
validate  their  rights  by  doing  battle  with  contesting  theories, 
and  with  that  spirit  of  doubt  and  of  nescience  which  attacks 
our  metaphysics  of  the  phenomena  of  soul-life.  Whoever 
confines  his  metaphysical  views  to  the  reflective  and  har- 
monious treatment  of  the  universal  and  unchanging  impli- 
cates of  the  life  of  cognition,  may  feel  obliged,  indeed,  to 
move  in  a  somewhat  narrow  circle.  But  within  that  circle 
he  is  impregnable.  So  far  as  self-cognition  extends,  the 
reality  of  Self  —  that  it  is  and  what  it  is  —  is  guaranteed 
beyond  the  possibility  of  sceptical  invasion.  The  metaphysics 
of  mind  is  to  this  limited  extent  involved  in  all  the  mental 
experiences  of  a  cognitive  order.1  So  much  and  such  Being 
I  have,  as  I  know  myself  to  have  had.  What  lies  below  or 
back  of  this  may  be  matter  of  legitimate  inference  or  of 
merely  doubtful  conjecture.  What  lies  above,  or  in  the 
future,  must  be  got  at  through  knowledge  of  the  present 
and  of  the  past,  by  reaching  out,  perchance,  along  the  lines 
of  persistent  faiths  and  hopes.  But  what  lies  within  this 
circle  is  known  to  be  true;  and  "truth"  means  here,  what 
truth  always  means  to  serious  minds,  —  the  mental  repre- 
sentation that  accords  with  the  really  existent. 

My  real  existence  is  an  undeniable  implicate  of  my  self- 
knowledge  ;  and,  indeed,  of  all  my  knowledge.  This  is  a 
proposition  from  which  all  metaphysics  takes  its  rise ;  and  to 
which  it  returns,  as  to  an  impregnable  stronghold,  as  often  as 

it  is  assailed,  or  to  an  all-illuminating  centre,  as  often  as  it 

.-  '..... 

1  It  is  this  ontological  doctrine  which,  with  only  a  few  extensions  beyond 
the  sphere  of  the  known,  the  author  has  tried  to  present  in  systematic  form  in  his 
"Philosophy  of  Mind." 


THE  IMPLICATES  OF  KNOWLEDGE  351 

finds  itself  astray.  To  deny  the  ontological  significance  of  the 
primal  fact,  "  I  know,"  is  to  deny  the  possibility  of  all  knowl- 
edge. For  it  is  always  /  that  know ;  and  if  this  "  I "  lose 
itself,  or  become  subjected  to  complete  aberration  of  self-knowl- 
edge, then  it  becomes  incapable  of  being  longer  the  subject  of 
any  kind  of  knowledge.  What  is  true  for  the  individual  is  true 
for  the  race.  Let  the  entire  multitude  of  men  be  conceived 
of  as  losing  this  Being  of  the  Self,  —  whether  by  complete 
aberration  of  self-consciousness  in  "  double  consciousness,"  or 
by  attaining  to  an  identification  with  "  the  Other  "  in  "  intel- 
lectual intuition,"  or  by  the  enjoyment  of  Nirvana,  or  otherwise, 
—  and,  then,  the  knowledge  of  the  race  (practical,  scientific, 
etc.)  is  gone.  Some  one  must  "come  to  himself"  —  signifi- 
cant phrase  !  —  before  cognition  can  return  to  man.  And  if 
"  that  Other"  lose  his  Being-for-Self,  or  be  supposed  never  to 
have  attained  it,  and  thus  share  at  the  same  time  the  sad  fate 
of  a  race  of  men  that  have  lost  themselves  ;  then  all  cognition 
is  gone.  And  what  would  remain  ?  Nothing  of  which  one 
could  even  say  :  — 

"  Ich  Tidbe  keinen  Namen 
Dafilr.     Gefuhl  ist  Alles." 

We  could  then  neither  posit  the  existence  of  phenomena  nor 
of  noumena.  The  agnostic  #eo?  apprjros  would  then  as  surely 
vanish  as  would  the  idols  of  the  South  Seas.  For  feeling, 
imagination,  thought,  cannot  of  themselves  guarantee  the  bare 
existence  of  the  otherwise  Unknown  ;  cognition  must  accom- 
plish this,  by  union  of  all  the  powers  of  the  self-conscious 
mind. 

All  attempt  at  a  theory  of  knowledge  —  no  matter  how  scep- 
tical or  agnostic  —  starts  from,  and  returns  to,  the  firm  centre 
of  the  Being  of  the  self-known  Self.  Just  as,  however,  this  "  I 
know"  is  not  a  rigid,  fixed,  and  ready-made  formula,  but  the 
characterization  of  a  living  and  changing  relation  of  subject 
and  object,  so  is  the  Being  of  the  Self,  which  is  implicate  in 
the  formula,  not  a  rigid,  fixed,  and  ready-made  existence. 


352  THE  IMPLICATES  OF  KNOWLEDGE 

The  substantiality  and  the  causality  of  this  Being  are  ever 
repeatedly  affirmed  afresh  in  every  cognitive  judgment. 
Throw  this  affirmation  into  the  form  of  an  "  existential  judg- 
ment" and  it  reads:  "I  experience  that  I  am;  I  live  and 
know  I  live  "  —  an  indubitable  positing  of  the  here-and-now 
being  of  the  subject  of  the  state.  But  the  same  affirmation 
involves  also  a  transcendental  judgment,  which  reflective 
thinking  is  obliged  to  read  thus:  "Out  of  this  present  con- 
scious state,  I  was  and  I  have  been  "  —  independent  of  my 
own  present  being  as  the  subject,  too,  of  those  other  states. 

Interwoven  with  the  very  texture  of  all  cognitive  processes, 
and  with  an  almost  equal  intricacy  of  relations  and  firmness 
of  manifold  connection,  is  an  implicate  of  the  real  existence  of 
other  minds  like  my  own.  We  are  not  concerned  just  now 
with  the  psychological  theory  of  the  processes  by  which  this 
interweaving  takes  place.  The  detailed  descriptive  history  of 
these  processes  would  not  alter  the  epistemological  and  onto- 
logical  significance  of  the  facts.  Other  beings  exist,  in  whose 
streams  of  consciousness  somehow  occur  cognitive  facts  which, 
in  their  conditions,  laws,  and  postulates,  resemble  my  own : 
I  am  not  the  only  one  who  can  say,  "  I  know ; "  there  are 
others,  and  many  of  them,  who  have  their  own  experiences  of 
a  cognitive  order.  This,  however  one  pleases  to  state  it,  is  an 
assumption  inseparable  from  the  very  experience  we  have 
with  ourselves  as  cognitive ;  and  it  is  so  implicated  in  this 
experience  that,  strictly  speaking,  no  sceptical  or  critical 
examination  of  the  facts  of  human  knowledge  can  even  be 
entered  upon  without  it. 

It  may  doubtless  be  pointed  out  that  Descartes,  and  all  who 
have  wished  to  push  to  its  extremest  limits  a  sceptical  inquiry 
into  the  foundations  of  knowledge,  have  assumed  as  the  only  per- 
fectly unassailable  proposition :  "  /  know."  Whether  any  one 
else  knows,  or  not,  and  indeed  whether  there  be  any  one  else,  to 
know  or  to  be  known,  is  thus  held  in  suspense  as  a  matter  of 
legitimate  doubt.  Moreover,  all  knowledge  of  other  minds — 


THE  IMPLICATES  OF  KNOWLEDGE  353 

both  that  they  are  and  that  they  know,  and  also  what  they  are 
actually  engaged  in  knowing — comes  by  the  interpretation  of 
physical  signs.  But  since  the  reality  of  the  very  beings  whose 
changing  relations  to  us  are  given  in  the  form  of  physical 
signs  of  conscious  states  may  itself  be  doubted,  there  would 
seem  to  be  two  great  gulfs  of  nescience  dug  between  each  self- 
cognizing  Self  and  the  other  selves  that  are  to  be  known  as 
self-cognizing,  too.  The  psychological  history  of  the  way  in 
which  the  individual  mind  comes  to  know  that  other  minds 
really  exist,  must,  indeed,  be  accepted :  We  know  other  selves 
only  as  we  learn  to  interpret  into  terms  of  our  own  experience, 
more  or  less  skilfully  but  always  with  much  chance  for  error, 
the  physical  signs  which  have  become  connected  with  the 
different  kinds  of  that  experience.  No  other  being,  besides 
myself,  do  1  know  so  fully  and  confidently  as  I  know  my 
dearest  most  familiar  human  friend.  Other  visions  may  be 
shattered,  and  the  world  seem  not  so  much  actually  changed ; 
for  still,  "I  am  I  "...  and  "thou  art  thou." 

But  this  very  psychological  history  introduces  into  episte- 
mology  one  of  its  most  interesting  and  fruitful  paradoxes,  — 
not  to  say  practical  self-contradictions.  For  what  men  know 
in  this  doubly  complex  and  doubtful  fashion  is,  after  all,  seen 
to  be  most  firmly,  simply,  and  indubitably  implicated  in  all 
their  knowledge.  Let  not  the  point  of  the  present  contention 
be  missed.  The  being  of  other  cognizing  minds,  like  the  being 
of  one's  own  mind,  seems  to  lack  the  stability  and  permanency, 
in  the  order  of  the  real  world,  which  unconscious  things 
appear  to  have ;  and  in  the  mental  construction  of  the  his- 
torical conditions  of  all  human  knowledge,  modern  science 
is  wont  to  posit  an  elaborate  system  of  "thing-like"  beings 
existing  through  countless  ages  before  the  first  process  of 
knowledge  actually  took  place.  This  may  all  be  warranted, 
or  it  may  not  be ;  it  is  of  no  interest  to  us  to  dispute  just 
now  about  the  warrant  for  so-called  anthropological  and  bio- 
logical evolution.  But  from  the  point  of  view  of  the  critical 

23 


354  THE  IMPLICATES  OF  KNOWLEDGE 

philosophy  of  knowledge  —  and  this  is  our  chosen  point  of 
view  —  how  different  does  such  so-called  science  appear ! 
For  let  one  attempt  now  to  call  in  question,  to  doubt,  or  even 
to  criticise  this  postulate.  One  can  only  do  this  by  assuming 
it  to  be  quite  valid  and  even  indisputably  true.  Or,  since  one 
naturally  prefers  to  be  on  the  side  of  one's  convictions  and 
where  one  is  sure  of  winning,  let  one  defend  the  implicate  of 
another's  real  being  against  that  other,  who  assails  the  general 
postulate  of  which  this  particular  implicate  is  an  example. 
It  is  now  proposed  to  argue  the  matter ;  and  to  get  arguments 
adjudged  as  true  or  false,  probable  or  improbable ;  and  to  see 
if  the  contestants  cannot  get  together  upon  some  common 
grounds. 

Plainly,  now,  all  proposal,  argument,  or  effort  to  reach  a 
conclusion,  and  all  the  clothing  given  by  the  symbols  chosen 
for  these  otherwise  incommunicable  mental  states,  themselves 
imply  the  real  being  of  many  minds.  One  cannot  even  propose 
one's  sceptical  idealism,  or  solipsistic  agnosticism,  as  a  view 
to  be  considered  by  one's  self,  in  the  deepest  solitudes  of  one's 
most  retired  chamber,  without  being  guilty  of  the  extreme 
of  absurdity.  In  vain  does  one  soothe  the  consciousness  of 
such  guilt  by  the  claim  that  the  search  is,  after  all,  in  the 
interests  of  a  self-consistency ;  for  what  is  that  which  it  is 
proposed  to  render  self-consistent  ?  Ideas,  opinions,  thoughts, 
conceived  of  as  mere  psychoses  or"  portions  of  the  ever-flowing 
stream  of  consciousness,  are  not  entities  that  need  to  be  har- 
monized with  each  other,  lest  they  actually  quarrel  and  fight 
it  out  with  one  another,  to  the  death.  Shall  it  be  claimed, 
however,  that  it  is  consistency  with  one's  self  which  the  inquir- 
ing defender  of  solipsism  seeks  ?  But  this  is  to  be  had  only 
by  being  of  the  same  opinion  all  the  way  through  —  unless, 
indeed,  it  is  something  more  than  mere  self-consistency  which 
is  sought.  Is  the  proposal,  then,  to  test  the  truth  of  the  doubt, 
or  denial,  of  the  reality  of  other  selves  than  one's  Self?  But 
what  is  truth  ?  The  question  is  now  more  puzzling  than  it 


THE  IMPLICATES  OF  KNOWLEDGE  355 

was  in  the  mouth  of  Pilate,  unless  it  be  admitted  that  some 
standard  for  the  judgment  of  one  mind  exists  in  the  structure 
of  other  minds. 

It  is  customary  with  those  who  take  their  solipsism  most 
seriously  to  whip  themselves  around  the  post,  and  reach,  as 
the  conclusion  of  this  painful  self-discipline,  the  periodic  affir- 
mation that,  after  all,  they  are  sure  of  nothing  except  the  cir- 
cular character  of  their  own  motion.  For  what,  they  continue 
to  ask,  are  these  other  beings  to  me,  but  just  my  own  percepts, 
mental  images,  and  abstract  conceptions,  —  mere  moments  in 
the  flux  of  that  stream  of  consciousness  I  call  myself  ?  Such 
a  conclusion,  however,  seems  to  neglect  the  very  pertinent  fact 
that,  somehow,  the  post  is  still  there ;  and  that  the  satisfac- 
tory completion  as  a  fact,  and  even  the  valid  description  of 
the  circular  character  of  the  motion  has  a  meaning  only  as  it 
assumes  the  extra-mental  existence  of  the  post.  The  criticism 
of  percepts,  mental  images,  and  abstract  conceptions,  with  a 
view  to  see  how  much  of  truth  is  in  them,  even  as  a  bare  pro- 
posal to  one's  self,  implies  some  standard  to  determine  the 
justice  of  the  issue.  This  standard  is  not  found  in  the  mere 
fact  "  I  think,"  as  a  purely  subjective  phenomenon  ;  but  it  is 
found  in  those  implicates  of"I know"  which  refer  my  think- 
ing to  the  universal  terms  of  cognition  really  existent  in  the 
laws  and  operations  of  other  minds. 

But  if  the  bare  proposal  to  reject  this  ontological  implicate 
of  all  our  cognitive  processes  ends  in  absurdity,  much  more 
obviously  is  the  actual  discussion  of  the  question  as  to  the 
validity  of  the  implicate  a  supreme  height  of  absurdity. 
Higher,  indeed,  up  the  rocky  and  dangerous  ways  of  agnos- 
ticism, by  attempting  the  path  of  self-contradiction,  it  is  pos- 
sible for  no  mind  to  climb.  This  feat  is  itself  a  demonstration 
of  the  wondrously  ambitious  athletic  quality  of  unchastened 
human  reason.  And  one  can  scarcely  avoid  suspecting  the 
triumphant  advocate  of  the  solipsistic  hypothesis  of  leaving 
his  vanquished  opponent  with  the  secret  feeling  that,  in  the 


356  THE  IMPLICATES  OF  KNOWLEDGE 

eyes  of  their  common  mistress,  The  Truth,  he  has  made  him- 
self a  being  of  little  account.  For  plainly,  if  the  dogmatic  or 
sceptical  denial  of  the  reality  of  other  minds  is  capable  of 
being  held  consistently  by  any  individual  Self,  it  is  quite  in- 
capable of  being  made  a  matter  of  communication  to  other 
selves.  If  one  knew  it  to  be  so,  one  could  not  tell  another 
this  truth,  without  assuming  and  affirming  that  it  is  not  really 
so,  is  not  truth.  The  principles  of  identity  and  of  sufficient 
reason,  by  their  combined  and  most  strenuous  efforts  cannot 
hold  one  to  a  proposition  more  self-evident  than  this  :  Com- 
munication of  knowledge,  or  even,  and  not  less  surely,  of 
doubt  and  of  nescience,  assumes  the  reality  of  at  least  two 
minds,  like  constituted,  as  well  as  the  actuality  of  certain  rela- 
tions established,  in  the  very  act  of  cognition,  between  them. 
Try  to  tell  me  that  this  is  not  so,  and  you  imply  that,  verily 
and  beyond  all  doubt,  it  is  so.  Try  to  inform  me  that  you 
doubt  my  view  on  this  point  and  are  preparing  to  contest  it 
(with  an  elaborate  article,  we  will  say,  in  the  "  Journal  of 
Sceptical  Philosophy  "  ),  and  you  only  avow  its  incontestable 
truth  many  times  over.  For,  however  the  implicate  of  other 
cognizing  subjects,  like  the  cognitive  Self,  gets  into  the  struc- 
ture of  every  cognition,  the  implicate  is  there;  and  it  is  there 
in  such  fashion  that  not  only  all  philosophical  discussion,  but 
also  every  thought  and  deed  looking  toward  the  communica- 
tion of  any  form  of  knowledge,  is  solemnly  pledged  to  its 
continued  existence  and  support. 

Nor  would  it  be  difficult  to  show  that  the  existence  and  use 
of  language,  or  of  any  other  symbols  for  the  communication  of 
knowledge  between  men,  also  involves  the  same  ontological 
truths.  The  proof  of  this  trutli  does  not  depend  upon  doubt- 
ful inferences  as  to  the  origin  and  value  of  human  language, 
or  as  to  the  nature  of  those  means  of  intercommunication 
that  are  employed  by  the  lower  animals.  In  man's  case,  at 
any  rate,  we  know  that  knowledge  is,  as  we  figuratively  say, 
"  conveyed "  by  language.  This  does  not  mean,  of  course, 


THE  IMPLICATES  OF  KNOWLEDGE  357 

that  knowledge  is  some  sort  of  vendible  or  otherwise  disposable 
goods,  which  can  be  carried  over  from  one  warehouse  in  the 
mind  of  A  and  deposited,  little  changed  or  injured  in  transit, 
within  another  place  of  safe-keeping,  the  mind  of  B.  But 
the  existence  and  actual  use  of  any  means  by  which,  within  a 
second  stream  of  consciousness,  cognitive  processes  may  be 
set  going,  that  resemble  the  cognitive  process  in  a  first 
stream  of  consciousness,  implicates  the  real  being  of  a  number 
of  "  like-minded  "  minds.  When  it  is  considered  that  nearly 
every  cognition  for  the  individual,  and  all  the  growth  of  learn- 
ing, science,  and  philosophy  for  the  race,  depends  upon  the 
communicability  of  knowledge,  the  solid  depth  and  wide- 
reaching  extent  of  this  implicate  are  apparent.  For  me,  and 
for  all  men  in  all  ages  of  the  world's  history,  knowledge  is  a 
growth.  The  roots  of  each  individual  cognition  penetrate 
and  ramify  through  the  entire  existence  of  the  human  race. 
The  individual's  knowledge  draws  its  vital  sap  and  receives  its 
form  of  manifestation  from  the  common  life.  The  substance 
and  the  morphology  of  cognition,  the  form  and  the  content  of 
every  cognitive  act,  are  generic  and  social  affairs.  Remove 
all  this,  whether  it  appear  as  the  uncritical  and  instinctive 
or  as  the  critical  and  developed  metaphysics  of  the  human 
mind,  and  little  or  nothing  is  left  to  make  my  knowledge  dis- 
tinguishable as  mine. 

These  considerations  bring  us  face  to  face  with  the  fact 
that  the  entire  solid  mass  of  human  feelings  and  convictions 
is  found  at  this  place  to  resist  all  attacks  from  scepticism  and 
agnosticism.  The  influence  of  ethical  and  assthetical  con- 
siderations upon  the  very  structure  and  suretyship  of  human 
knowledge  affords  a  theme  to  which  detailed  reference  will 
be  made  later  on.  If  there  were  only  this  to  rely  upon  in 
resistance  to  such  attacks,  there  need  be  no  fear  for  the  cita- 
del of  truth,  or  for  the  region  it  immediately  defends.  Men 
will  never  credit  the  statement  that  indubitable  knowledge  of 
the  real  existence  of  other  minds  is  impossible.  The  guar- 


358  THE  IMPLICATES  OF  KNOWLEDGE 

anty  of  this  would  be  sufficient,  if  it  were  to  be  placed  among 
those  truths  whose  final  evidence,  according  to  Lotze,1  is  not 
logical  at  all,  but  rather  aesthetical  —  not  the  impossibility  of 
not  thinking  them,  but  the  unseemly  absurdity  of  their  disproof. 
The  feelings  of  every  individual  commit  him  too  unalterably  to 
a  belief  in  the  reality  of  his  fellow  men  to  allow  of  much  more 
than  spending  an  idle  hour  of  speculation  in  the  effort  to  see 
if  he  cannot  persuade  himself  that  they  are  but  the  projec- 
tion, upon  a  subjectively  constituted  background,  of  his  own 
mental  images  and  experiences  of  an  affective  type. 

In  the  fact  of  cognition,  however,  and  in  the  defensible 
theory  of  knowledge,  the  implicate  of  the  reality  of  other 
minds  belongs  to  the  very  structure  of  experience.  Every 
factor  of  my  cognitive  life  —  thought,  feeling,  and  will ;  and 
however  expressed,  whether  as  inference,  blind  belief,  rational 
postulate,  instinctive  or  determinative  action  —  pledges  me  to 
the  reality  of  other  beings,  that  are  known  as  selves  like  me, 
but  are  not-me.  The  reality  of  such  beings  is  an  ontological 
implicate  that  admits  neither  of  denial  nor  of  disproof.  It 
does  not  even  admit  of  question  or  statement  in  the  form 
of  doubt,  without  revealing  at  once  the  intrinsic  absurdity  of 
contradicting  it. 

Once  more,  the  reality  of  a  system  of  things  which  have 
some  sort  of  separate  being,  and  yet  are  connected  together  in 
some  kind  of  unitary  way,  and  to  which  I  find  myself  related 
in  varying  terms  of  reciprocal  activity  and  passivity,  is  an  onto- 
logical implicate  of  all  human  cognition.  Undoubtedly,  this 
very  complicated  statement  of  the  truth  of  experience  will 
be  contested  by  not  a  few  reflective  thinkers  upon  the  problem 
of  knowledge.  But,  here  again,  even  in  contesting,  they  will 
admit  it ;  for  thus  much  of  known  reality  is  inextricably  bound 
up  in,  and  guaranteed  by,  the  fundamental  experiences  of 
every  mind  in  cognition,  and  the  most  ardent  advocate  of 
the  extremest  form  of  solipsism  is  unable  to  free  himself  from 

1  Logik;  the  last  part  of  the  chapter,  Die  apriorischen  Wahrheiten. 


THE  IMPLICATES  OF  KNOWLEDGE  359 

the  charge  of  absurdity  in  proposing  to  argue  this  implicate. 
Further  critical  examination  of  this  epistemological  truth 
reveals  the  fact  that  in  defending  it,  we  are  only  affirming 
the  validity,  for  all  known  Reality,  of  the  most  fundamental 
of  the  so-called  "  categories."  And  this  is  the  inevitable 
conclusion  from  all  the  analysis  of  knowledge  which  has 
been  accomplished  up  to  this  point  in  the  discussion  of  the 
epistemological  problem.  The  simple  truth  is,  then,  that  we 
must  either  abandon  all  claims  to  knowledge,  in  any  meaning 
of  the  word  which  can  get  recognition  by  the  facts  of  human 
experience,  or  else  we  must  admit  the  claims  of  some  such 
implicate  as  this. 

The  detailed  discussion  of  the  separate  categories  discover- 
able in  this  ontological  implicate,  the  complicated  affirmation 
as  to  the  Being  of  X  which  is  involved  in  the  totality  of  hu- 
man cognitive  life,  is  a  treatise  on  metaphysics,  —  if  only  the 
discussion  be  combined  with  a  criticism  of  those  bonds  which 
are  held  by  all  men  to  connect  the  differentiated  things  to- 
gether into  some  sort  of  a  Unitary  Reality.  Such  discussion 
is,  of  course,  reserved  for  another  essay.  But  a  few  words 
upon  several  points  seem  necessary  to  bring  the  epistemologi- 
cal discussion  to  a  satisfactory  conclusion  at  this  point. 

All  human  knowledge  both  assumes  and  guarantees  the 
validity  of  the  application  of  the  category  of  Relation  to  the 
really  existent  world.  This  category  has,  not  inaptly,  been 
called  "  the  mother  of  all  the  others ; " 1  only  it  must  be  remem- 
bered that  categories  are  not  the  breed  of  one  another,  after  the 
pattern  of  biological  entities.  This  concept  is  derived  from  the 
self-observed  form  of  the  intellect  as  operative  in  every  cogni- 
tive process  of  whatever  character.  Relation  applies  to  phe- 
nomena and  other  phenomena,  to  phenomena  and  the  realities 
of  which  they  are  phenomena  and  to  which  they  are  phenomena, 
to  thoughts  and  thoughts,  to  thoughts  and  things,  and  to  things 
and  things.  No  other  category  is  so  universal ;  and,  there- 

1  A  phrase  of  Giinther's.     See  Klein,  "  Die  Genesis  der  Kategorien,"  p.  32. 


360  THE   IMPLICATES  OF  KNOWLEDGE 

fore,  no  other  is  so  impossible  of  definition  or  even  of  descrip- 
tion. It  cannot  be  made  clearer  than  it  is  in  itself.  It  gets 
its  most  immediate  and  indubitable  application  to  reality,  in 
the  actual  concrete  cognitions  of  self-consciousness.  And  if 
we  say  of  things  that  they  have  such  qualities,  and  stand  in 
such  relations,  as  matters  of  our  cognition,  we  can  attach  no 
meaning  to  the  words  "  have  "  and  "  stand,"  unless  we  trans- 
late them  into  our  experience,  as  self-conscious  selves,  with  our 
objects  of  cognition.  What  is  it  really  to  be  related  ?  What 
relates  ;  and  what  is  related  ?  A  critical  metaphysics  shows 
that  no  answers  can  be  given  to  such  questions,  unless  things 
are  conceived  of  as  self-active  beings,  with  their  various  modes 
of  behavior  interdependent  and  yet  united  under  a  frame- 
work, so  to  speak,  of  immanent  ideas.  Unrelated  Being  is, 
indeed,  unknowable ;  but,  then,  this  is  not  the  fault  of  human 
knowledge,  which  forces  it  to  become  hopelessly  agnostic 
because  it  cannot  rise  above  its  own  inherent  faults.  It  is 
rather  due  to  the  fundamental  truth  that  knowledge  is  a 
grasp  upon  reality,  and  that  unrelated  being  is  unreal ;  it  is 
no  Being,  but  only  the  figment  of  an  ill-disciplined  imagi- 
nation which,  having  got  loose  from  the  facts  of  experi- 
ence, is  trying  to  "  cut  capers "  in  air  too  thin  for  its  own 
healthy  existence. 

The  valid  application  of  the  connected  categories  of  Change 
and  Causality  to  the  really  existent  world  is  also  implicate  in 
all  human  cognition.  The  real  Being  of  X  is  given  to  human 
knowledge  not  as  an  Eleatic  One  and  Unchangeable  but  as  a 
Principle  of  Becoming.  It  has,  indeed,  its  own  Unity,  or 
Oneness,  the  nature  of  which  the  human  mind  may  eagerly 
strive  to  apprehend.  It  has,  too,  its  regulative  principles, 
from  which  it  never  swerves,  and  which  stand,  themselves 
unchangeable,  amid  all  the  changes  of  finite  minds  and  finite 
things.  But  to  deny  or  to  doubt  the  reality  of  change  —  of  a 
system  of  interdependent  changes  constituting  a  connected 
and  unitary  process  of  Becoming  —  is  to  deny  or  to  doubt 


THE  IMPLICATES  OF  KNOWLEDGE  361 

the  possibility  of  knowledge.  And  why  some  huge  mon- 
strosity of  an  ontological  sort,  a  great  all-embracing  death's- 
head  of  a  Ding-an-Sich,  should  have  superior  attractions  for 
metaphysical  philosophy,  it  is  difficult  to  determine.  At  any 
rate,  change  is  here,  in  the  real  world  as  men  know  it ;  and 
it  is  so  bound  up  with  the  life  of  human  knowledge  that  its 
removal  sacrifices  the  life  itself. 

Without  further  specifications,  —  lest  the  task  of  episteinol- 
ogy  be  too  much  burdened  and  the  task  of  ontology  be  made 
correspondingly  too  light,  —  we  close  this  chapter  with  two  re- 
marks. And,  first,  the  philosophy  of  knowledge,  when  its  criti- 
cal analysis  is  extended  and  made  more  penetrating,  comes  to 
regard  the  categories  as,  above  all,  those  forms  or  determina- 
tions in  which  the  spirit,  in  its  process  of  becoming  self- 
conscious,  finds  itself  by  its  own  constitution  compelled  to 
apprehend  itself  and  its  own  life.  All  the  so-called  categories 
are  but  the  forms  which  reflective  recognition  gives  to  the 
facts  of  self-consciousness.  This  they  all  are,  epistemologi- 
cally  considered.  Ontologically  considered,  they  become  forms 
of  being,  as  "  implicate  "  in  self -consciousness.  But  that 
"  Self"  which,  as  a  concept,  is  the  spirit's  own  construction, 
embraces  other  being,  and  other  life,  in  its  own  cognitive  and 
self-conscious  development.  Therefore,  a  true  and  full  knowl- 
edge of  Self  is  the  prime  condition  of  a  valid  and  ever  larger 
knowledge  of  all  Being. 

Strangely  enough,  that  great  reflective  genius,  Kant,  failed 
here,  and  introduced  all  the  modern  fashion,  so  far  as  it  has 
followed  him,  of  treating  the  categories  as  dead  or  merely 
formal  modes  of  the  functioning  of  mind  in  judgment.  When, 
however,  these  same  categories  are  seen  to  be  the  indubita- 
bly trustworthy  modes  of  the  soul's  life  of  cognition,  in  its 
immediate  and  yet  growing  apprehension  of  its  own  Being 
and  its  justifiable  and  necessary  but  analogical  apprehension 
of  the  Being  of  the  World  without,  the  face  of  the  critic 
of  cognitive  faculty  begins  to  wear  another  look.  The  real 


362  THE  IMPLICATES  OF  KNOWLEDGE 

trouble  of  modern  epistemological  theory  has  been  with  the 
Kantian  formalism,  and  not  with  the  facts  of  experience. 
The  facts,  indeed,  lead  to  moderation  in  theory  and  to 
caution  in  life.  For  the  island  of  the  human  mind  has 
not,  as  yet,  been  thoroughly  explored  by  any  critic ;  and  there 
are,  indeed,  unknown  and,  perhaps,  unknowable  stretches  to 
its  limiting  ocean.  But  if  I  will  begin  by  knowing  myself, 
not  in  a  merely  formal  and  logical  way,  but  as  a  concrete, 
active,  and  free  rationality,  having  valid  commerce  with  the 
world  of  the  really  existent — however  restricted  that  com- 
merce may  be  —  I  need  not  forever  approach  with  despair 
either  the  woods  and  jungles  of  the  island  or  the  mists  and 
fogs  of  the  surrounding  seas.  For  I  am  thus  empowered  to 
make  certain  affirmations  and  certain  denials  with  regard  to 
the  Nature  of  all  Reality.  Positively,  its  nature  is,  so  far 
as  known,  like  that  of  my  own  Self.  This  conclusion  does 
not  take  the  form  of  a  command  to  declare  the  complete 
and  unalterable  impossibility  of  a  valid  cognition  of  Reality  ; 
the  rather  is  it  the  discovery  of  Reality,  as  it  actually  is, 
implicate  in  my  cognitive  consciousness.  Cautiously  inter- 
preted and  correctly  understood,  so  much  is  true  of  that 
most  complicated  and  obviously  anthropomorphic  of  all  the 
so-called  categories,  the  concept  of  causality.  When  it  is 
seen  how  this  category,  in  all  its  concrete  richness  of  content, 
as  developed  by  the  mature  self-consciousness,  is  but  the  as- 
sertion of  the  Self's  valid  experience  in  its  cognitive  commerce 
with  things,  the  necessity  becomes  apparent  of  regarding  the 
principle  as  something  more  than  merely  formal,  as  rather  a 
true  mental  representation  of  the  Being  of  the  extra-men- 
tally  Existent.  Under  this  category  is  obtained  a  valid  cog- 
nition of  real  things,  actual  transactions,  true  relations,  etc. 
Just  as  all  our  formal  thinking  reposes,  for  its  formal  cor- 
rectness, upon  certain  cognitive  judgments  of  perception  and 
of  self-consciousness,  so  does  our  varied  knowledge  of  the 
beings,  transactions,  and  relations  of  the  real  World,  ground 


THE  IMPLICATES   OF  KNOWLEDGE  363 

itself  firmly  in  the  immediate  knowledge  of  ourselves  as 
really  existent  in  actual  relations  of  reciprocal  dependence 
to  the  objects  of  perception  through  the  senses.1 

But  certain  current  conceptions  as  to  the  nature  of  Reality, 
instead  of  being  confirmed,  are  quite  distinctly  disproved  by 
this  view  of  the  way  the  categories  get  application  to  objec- 
tive experience.  We  cannot  so  apply  the  principles  of  iden- 
tity and  non-contradiction,  or  of  sufficient  reason,  as  to  affirm 
that  the  entire  Nature  of  the  World's  real  Being  is  given  to 
us  in  conceptions  answering  to  terms  such  as  these:  "The 
reign  of  universal  Law ; "  "  The  unalterable  Cosmic  Order ; " 
"  The  dominion  of  universal  Reason,"  —  meaning  by  "  Law," 
"  Order,"  and  "  Reason,"  what  is  customarily  concealed  in  the 
•words.  True,  the  principle  of  identity  and  non-contradiction 
cannot  be  gainsaid ;  and  under  it  there  is  given  to  cognition 
a  really  existent  World  that  must  be  known  as  some  sort  of 
a  self-consistent  whole.  But  when  it  is  asserted,  in  the  words 
of  another,2  "  The  contradictory  is  a  category  which  can  only 
belong  to  the  combination  of  our  thoughts,  but  not  to  any 
actuality,"  we  must  beware  of  the  temptation  illegitimately 
to  reduce  all  things  to  the  terms  of  a  perfect  logical  and  formal 
consistency.  Actuality,  as  known,  is  full  of  the  most  baffling 
contradictions,  when  it  is  approached  with  the  determination  to 
throw  a  halter  over  its  neck  and  tame  it  completely  with  reins 
and  whip  of  the  "  pure  understanding."  But,  then,  the  Self, 
in  terms  of  whose  own  life  we,  analogically  and  by  application 
of  the  categories,  gain  a  knowledge  of  that  other  Life,  is  not 
mere  law,  or  order,  or  pure  understanding. 

1  Again  attention  is  called  to  the  effects  upon  the  philosophy  of  knowledge 
which  follow  from  that  most  mischievous  and  absurd  of  all  the  current  psycho- 
logical heresies  —  the  theory  of  psycho-physical  parallelism.     It  should  by  this 
time  be  apparent  that  this  theory  is  not  only  scientifically  quite  indefensible 
and  void  of  support  in  facts,  but  inextricably  connected  with  the  most  complete 
and  hopeless  agnosticism  of  an  epistemological  sort.     Moreover,  it  totally  destroys 
the  foundations  upon  which  is  based  the  conception  of  the  whole   of  experience  — 
the  World  —  as  founded  in  a  real  Unity. 

2  Diihring,  Cursus  der  Thilosophie,  p.  30. 


364  THE  IMPLICATES  OF  KNOWLEDGE 

The  Being  of  the  World  need  not  be  any  less  real,  or  less 
validly  and  indubitably  known,  if  it  is  conceived  of,  in  part,  in 
terms  of  the  passionate  feeling-full,  ethical,  and  aesthetical 
nature  of  man.  Such  anthropopathic  cognition  need  be  not 
one  whit  less  true  to  facts  than  the  cold-blooded  anthropo- 
morphism of  physical  science.  Especially  does  the  scientific 
observer  of  nature  require  caution  as  to  the  use  he  makes  of 
the  category  of  causality.  In  the  current  scientific  use  of 
this  term  it  has,  indeed,  absolutely  no  warrant  for  a  complete 
and  inexorable  application  to  the  Being  of  the  really  Existent. 
As  Riehl  has  correctly  said,1  this  conception  and  its  accom- 
panying conviction  "  is  obviously  wanting  even  to-day  in  the 
majority  of  men,  and  appears  to  have  been  wanting  to  the 
philosophy  of  antiquity  down  to  the  time  of  Democritus."  And 
when  the  conception  of  causality  is  itself  confined  to  the  law 
of  the  conservation  and  correlation  of  energy,  and  the  whole 
World  is  reduced  to  a  problem  in  mathematical  mechanics, 
the  state  of  our  knowledge,  and  the  hope  of  it,  become  meagre 
and  pitiful  indeed.  It  is,  then,  in  point  to  call  attention  to 
the  fact  that,  really,  there  is  no  such  thing  as  mathematical 
Space  or  mathematical  Time ;  no  such  reality  as  a  sum-total  of 
Physical  Energy  ;  and  that  we  have  no  such  assured  knowledge 
of  its  entities  or  actual  relations  as  is  needed  to  validate  the 
preposterous  claim  that  the  world  of  Things  and  of  Minds  cor- 
responds to  the  conception  of  a  machine. 

But,  second,  we  may  venture,  even  in  the  name  of  the 
philosophy  of  knowledge  and  by  a  permissible  extension  of 
the  speculative  privileges  which  belong  to  its  serious  student, 
to  suggest  another  and  much  more  admirable  picture  of  the 
real  Being  of  the  World.  This  JT,  which  is  the  Being  of  the 
World  (the  "  World-Ground  "  or  the  "  Absolute,"  as  metaphys- 
ics is  accustomed  to  call  It  when  developing  the  doctrine  of  it 
speculatively),  must  be  further  conceived  of  so  as  to  be  a  true 
explanatory  principle  for  all  our  varied  cognitions  of  Things. 

1  Der  Philosophische  Kriticismus,  II.,  ii.,  p.  80. 


THE  IMPLICATES  OF  KNOWLEDGE  365 

It  must  exhibit  the  meaning  of  the  world,  as  known  to  man, 
by  throwing  its  radiance  upon  all  particular  beings,  particular 
events,  and  special  relations.  That  X  cannot  be  made  to  do 
this  work  as  a  task  performed  in  deduction  under  strictly 
logical  formulas,  follows  from  the  way  in  which  the  principle 
itself  is  found  implicate  in  all  concrete,  individual  cognitions. 
It  may  do  a  similar  work,  however,  as  a  kind  of  epistemologi- 
cal  postulate  so  constructed  by  reflective  thinking  as  to  be 
itself  guaranteed  by  these  concrete  cognitions,  while,  at  the 
same  time,  shedding  the  light  of  its  radiance  upon  them  all. 
But  it  can  perform  this  task  only  if  it  is  conceived  of  both  as 
a  principle  of  manifoldness  or  differentiation,  and  as  a  prin- 
ciple of  unity.  It  must  be  a  principle  of  explanation  for  the 
actual  manifoldness  of  the  one  real  World.  Now  the  reality 
of  a  system  of  inter-connected  changes  has  been  found  impli- 
cate in  all  the  life  of  the  cognitive  subject.  It  would  seem, 
then,  that  the  fundamental  principle  must  serve  as  the  Ground, 
the  Law,  and  the  Final  Purpose  of  this  system  of  changes. 
Moreover,  this  system  is  known  as  a  sort  of  unity  that  has 
centres  of  self-activity  whicli  are  not  complete  in  themselves, 
but  which  are  bound  together  into  a  formal  whole,  because 
they  are  existent  in  Space  and  Time,  whose  characteristics 
they  all  share,  and  are  also  bound  together  in  more  vital  ways 
by  the  actual  operation  of  what  we  call  a  causal  connection. 
It  would  seem,  then,  that  some  kind  of  an  Absolute  Being 
must  be  postulated  for  that  final  summary  which  shall  ex- 
press the  full  force  and  meaning  of  the  ontological  implicates 
of  all  human  knowledge.  For,  as  has  been  said,  JTmust  serve 
as  a  principle  both  of  differentiation  and  of  unity. 

This  generalization  from  the  ontological  implicates  of  knowl- 
edge, under  one  term,  must  be  further  criticised  and  expli- 
cated by  metaphysics.  For  here,  if  anywhere,  is  discovered 
the  sacred  bridge  over  which  ontological  philosophy  may  pass 
to  conquer  as  much  of  the  region  on  the  hither  side  as  its 
forces  can,  by  combined  and  prolonged  effort.  Just  now  it 


366  THE  IMPLICATES  OF  KNOWLEDGE 

does  not  appear  as  though  a  long  campaign  were  necessary  to 
establish,  at  least,  several  impregnable  strongholds  in  this 
region.  For  our  cognition  of  what  is  real  has  been  shown 
to  be  all,  either  of  the  Self,  or  of  the  not-self,  —  the  latter 
known  assuredly,  but  only  after  the  analogy  of  the  Self. 
Human  experience  indicates,  then,  that  the  one  postulate  of 
its  system  of  cognitions  must  be  stated  somewhat  as  follows : 
The  Being  of  the  World  is  a  Unity,  self -differentia  ting  in  accord- 
ance with  immanent  Ideas.  Translated  into  terms  which  are 
nearer  to  daily  experience  and  have  a  more  positive  content : 
The  system  of  interrelated  beings,  which  are  objects  of  man's 
knowledge,  is  known  only  as  it  is  a  manifestation  of  Intellect, 
Feeling,  and  Will.  The  Being  of  the  really  Existent  must 
include  all  these  qualifications,  for  they  are  all  implicates  of 
that  life  of  cognition  which  the  Self  knows  itself  to  have. 


CHAPTER  XIII 

SCEPTICISM,  AGNOSTICISM,  AND  CRITICISM 

THE  attitudes  of  men's  minds  toward  the  different  forms 
or  sets  of  cognitive  judgments,  as  well  as  toward  the 
nature  and  validity  of  all  cognition,  admit  of  a  considerable 
and  most  instructive  variability.  Practical  considerations  do, 
indeed,  always  draw  a  tight  rein  over  the  neck  of  "  pure  un- 
derstanding" and  of  "rational  faith,"  in  their  efforts  to 
afford  to  a  merely  speculative  or  emotional  regard  for  truth 
and  reality  its  fullest  satisfaction.  One  may  adopt  and 
adhere  as  consistently  as  possible  to  the  most  extreme  form 
of  a  sceptical  idealism,  but  one  must  behave  as  though  other 
minds  and  other  things  were  existent  in  a  reality  of  which 
their  appearances  to  us  are  in  some  sort  a  correct  and  trust- 
worthy copy.  He  who  attempts  to  act,  with  a  strict  logical 
consistency,  according  to  the  hypothesis  that  the  world  of 
objects  known  to  him  is  merely  his  "  idea,"  runs  no  small  risk 
of  pursuing  his  dream-like  life  in  the  confines  of  the  mad- 
house. It  is,  indeed,  confessedly  difficult  —  perhaps  impos- 
sible —  to  lay  down  rules  for  the  infallible  distinction  of  a 
great  variety  of  illusions  and  hallucinations  from  the  plainest 
facts  of  normal  perceptive  experience.  Every  observer  knows, 
moreover,  that  the  most  completely  logical  systems  of  a  scien- 
tific or  philosophical  order  are  most  apt  to  encounter  invincible 
opposition  from  the  concrete  facts  of  nature  and  of  human 
life.  But  the  alternative,  if  one  wishes  to  "  get  along  "  at  all 
satisfactorily  in  the  world,  is  certainly  not  to  be  found  either 
in  the  confusion  of  all  limits  between  the  normal  and  the 


368        SCEPTICISM,   AGNOSTICISM,   AND  CRITICISM 

hallucinatory  in  sense-perception,  or  in  the  refusal  to  take 
pains  to  think  with  theoretic  clearness,  or  in  the  rejection  of 
all  guidance  from  reason  in  so-called  practical  affairs.  Espe- 
cially true  and  noteworthy  is  the  fact  that  in  matters  of  con- 
duct, scepticism  and  agnosticism  meet  with  exceedingly  firm 
and  comprehensive  resistance.  He  who  even  expresses  a  com- 
plete nescience,  or  an  unlimited  doubt,  as  to  the  surrounding 
body  of  judgments  about  the  right  forms  of  behavior,  although 
his  mental  attitudes  may  not  lead  him  to  the  practice  of  his 
scepticism  or  agnosticism,  is  isolated  from  the  community  of 
his  fellows  by  their  distrust  and  scorn  ;  and  he,  too,  may  end 
his  days  in  some  cell  of  a  prison  or  mad-house. 

So-called  practical  considerations  influence  cogently  the 
tendencies  toward  a  sceptical  or  agnostic  attitude  of  mind 
in  respect  of  certain  objects  also,  which  are  more  fitly  re- 
garded as  belonging  to  the  realm  of  faith  than  of  "  pure  un- 
derstanding." No  one  can  doubt  that,  in  fact,  it  is  the  needs, 
desires,  hopes,  and  fears  of  men  which  so  largely  stir  and 
guide  them  in  the  mental  relations  they  assume  toward  God, 
freedom,  and  the  immortal  life.  As  Tolstoi  makes  one  of  his 
characters  affirm,  it  is  in  life  rather  than  by  processes  of  rea- 
soning that  men  find  God.  Most  men  —  and,  perhaps,  in  the 
last  analysis,  the  most  argumentative  of  them  —  refuse  to  be 
satisfied  with  the  statistics  and  mechanical  formulas  of  the 
determinist ;  because  these  do  not  accord  with  their  ideas  of 
value  rather  than  purely  because  they  do  not  harmonize  witli 
the  details  of  the  world  of  fact.  And  "  ideas  of  value  "  are 
allurements  and  helps  to  conduct  first ;  only  afterward,  and 
then  somewhat  vaguely,  do  they  yield  themselves  to  scientific 
and  philosophical  treatment.  The  forlorn  and  lonely  soul 
who  has  just  seen  lowered  away  —  "  earth  to  earth,  ashes  to 
ashes,~and  dust  to  dust "  —  what  was  but  yesterday  so  really 
present  and  so  tenderly  dear  to  him,  finds  little  enough  of 
logical  stuff  for  a  demonstration  of  immortality  in  the  earth 
beneath,  the  sky  above,  or  the  sad  mortals  around  him ;  but 


SCEPTICISM,   AGNOSTICISM,   AND  CRITICISM        369 

perhaps  he  cannot  bear,  and  will  not  bear,  to  have  it  so  as 
that  this  is  the  end  of  all. 

Yet  scepticism  and  agnosticism  remain  legitimate  and  valu- 
able (even  indispensable)  attitudes  of  the  human  mind  toward 
all  the  objects  both  of  knowledge  and  of  so-called  faith.  Their 
legitimacy  is  proved  by  the  obvious  experience  of  the  individual 
and  of  the  race.  This  experience  plainly  shows  that  the  phe- 
nomena represented  by  the  words  are  not  incidental,  abnormal, 
or  superficial  in  the  mental  and  moral  development  of  man. 
On  the  contrary,  they  belong  to  the  very  deepest  things  in  the 
life  and  growth  of  reason.  To  doubt  and  inquire,  to  refuse 
to  affirm,  and  to  deny,  whether  applied  in  the  interests  of  con- 
duct, of  science,  or  of  speculative  thinking,  are  as  essential  to 
the  processes  of  cognition  as  are  faith  and  affirmation  of  the 
most  positive  and  undisturbed  kind.  Moreover,  the  attaining 
and  holding  of  our  most  assured  products  of  cognition  are  de- 
pendent upon  those  mental  attitudes  which  fall  under  the  terms 
"  scepticism  "  and  "  agnosticism  "  ;  and  the  history  of  science 
and  philosophy  —  yes,  also,  and  not  less  abundantly,  the  his- 
tory of  ethical  and  religious  opinions  and  faiths  —  shows  the 
indispensable  value  of  these  dubitating  and  negative  states  of 
mind.  It  is  not  simply  that  in  this  way  only  can  error  be  con- 
stantly discerned  and  separated  from  truth  ;  but  it  is  also  and 
chiefly  that  the  very  life  of  the  mind,  in  its  most  eager  and 
successful  pursuit  of  truth,  necessarily  follows  the  same  path. 
The  dignity  and  worth  of  the  Self,  as  known  to  itself,  and  so 
the  dignity  and  worth  of  all  that  really  existent  World  which 
can  be  known  only  analogically,  as  implicate  in  and  correlated 
with  the  knowledge  of  Self,  depend  upon  the  ability  to  pause, 
to  withhold  judgment,  to  check  the  tendency  to  a  rash  dogma- 
tism, and  even  to  remain  in  intelligent  and  avowed  nescience 
where  knowledge  is  denied.  Although  there  remains  the  inde- 
structible confidence  of  the  soul  that  the  world  of  fact  and  the 
world  of  values  is  somehow  one  and  harmonious,  and  although 
we  can  never  divorce  knowledge  from  its  own  teleological  con- 

24 


370        SCEPTICISM,   AGNOSTICISM,   AND   CRITICISM 

struction  and  import,  it  is  better  for  the  present  to  doubt  and 
suffer,  or  to  acknowledge  a  discontented  and  hopeless  igno- 
rance, than  to  believe  a  lie  or  to  prostitute  reason  for  the 
satisfaction  of  a  lust  after  pleasure,  or  a  longing  to  escape 
from  pain. 

At  the  same  time,  experience  is  one ;  and  the  effort  of 
thought  is  to  explain  in  its  totality  what  must  be  taken  in  its 
totality.  A  human  soul,  divided  against  itself,  cannot  stand. 
And  woe  to  the  generation  which,  while  affirming  a  scientific 
or  philosophic  knowledge  of  one  thing,  keeps  up  its  courage 
by  exhorting  faith  and  conduct  "  as  though "  another  and 
opposite  thing  were  true.  For  that  generation  is  doomed 
either  to  reject  the  exhortation  or  to  become  a  generation  of 
weaklings  and  hypocrites.  Neither  can  we  believe  that  natu- 
ral science  and  philosophy  on  the  one  hand,  and  conduct  and 
faith  on  the  other  hand,  are  so  different  in  either  their 
sources,  their  nature,  or  their  ultimate  principles,  insights, 
and  imports,  that  they  admit  of  thus  being  divorced.  What 
retribution  is  visited  upon  those  who  continue  to  preach  as 
right  in  conduct  what  they  make  no  attempt  to  practise,  and 
who  hold  fast  to  dogmatic  tenets  and  credos  in  religion  which 
they  are  sure  science  has  transcended  or  removed,  there  is 
history  enough  to  show.  But  here  is  one  of  those  rules  which 
are  poor  indeed  if  they  do  not  work  both  ways.  And  dog- 
matic tenets  and  credos  in  science  or  philosophy  do  not,  in 
the  long  run,  and  when  judged  by  the  ultimate  standards, 
fare  much  better,  if  they  claim  for  themselves  an  immunity 
from  scepticism  and  agnosticism  which  they  will  not  grant  to 
so-called  ethical  and  religious  faiths.  Human  nature  will  not 
forever  bear  to  be  arrayed  against  itself.  If  Kant  failed  of 
success  in  removing  knowledge  in  order  to  make  room  for 
faith,  the  original  effort  of  Mr.  Spencer,  in  his  "  First  Prin- 
ciples," to  reconcile  science  and  religion  upon  a  basis  of 
complete  agnosticism,  has  been  a  ten-fold  more  conspicuous 
failure.  Nor  will  the  wise  student  of  the  history  of  man's 


SCEPTICISM,  AGNOSTICISM,   AND  CRITICISM        371 

development  place  much  confidence  in  any  of  the  current  pro- 
posals for  a  "  reconciliation  "  which  is  to  be  effected  by  as- 
signing one  set  of  faculties,  as  it  were,  to  science,  and  another 
to  conduct  and  religion ;  or  by  proposing  that  one  attitude  of 
mind  shall  be  turned  toward  the  world  of  things  as  natural 
science  sees  it,  for  six  days  each  week,  and  another  contra- 
dictory attitude  toward  God  and  immortality,  for,  at  most,  an 
hour  and  a  half  of  the  remaining  day.  For  the  simple  truth 
is  that,  sooner  or  later,  men  will  walk  all  the  way  through 
their  experience ;  they  will  try  to  survey  it  on  all  sides  ;  and 
as  they  walk  and  look,  they  will  be  human  natures  still,  — 
thinking,  feeling,  planning,  full  of  interest,  not  only  in  the 
world  visible  and  present,  but  in  the  world  unseen,  and  in 
the  world  that  is  ever  about  to  come. 

It  is  not  our  intention,  however,  in  this  chapter  to  attempt 
a  historical  or  a  critical  estimate  of  the  sources,  nature,  and 
value  of  the  sceptical  and  agnostic  attitudes  of  mind.  Nor 
does  the  present  purpose  require  that  any  particular  form 
of  truth  should  be  defended  against  assaults  made  by  those 
who  persistently  assume  either  of  these  attitudes.  The  latter 
and  more  restricted  of  these  two  inquiries  would,  if  thoroughly 
pursued,  lead  to  a  detailed  examination  of  the  nature  and 
limits  of  the  evidence  and  proof  which  may  be  demanded  by 
each  of  those  special  groups  of  cognitions  and  opinions  toward 
which  it  is  possible  for  the  individual  mind  to  be  either  dog- 
matic, sceptical,  or  agnostic.  And  here  Aristotle's  view  seems 
as  wise  and  fitly  applicable  as  ever.  We  must  not  expect  the 
same  kind  of  proof  or  evidence  for  all  kinds  of  subjects.  For 
although  our  experience  is  one  and  cannot  be  discerned  except 
as  illumined  from  the  full-orbed  and  central  light  of  the  self- 
conscious  Self,  yet  the  different  objects  of  that  one  experience 
get  themselves  accepted  as  real,  or  are  denied  place  in  the 
world  of  reality,  in  widely  differing  ways  and  upon  terms 
that  are  by  no  means  precisely  the  same. 

For  example,  those  concepts  of  all  physics  with  which  the 


372        SCEPTICISM,   AGNOSTICISM,  AND  CRITICISM 

most  mathematical  branches  of  astronomy  deal  are  as  truly 
mental  products,  that  cannot  be  understood  without  a  correct 
doctrine  of  the  feeling-full  and  voluntary  nature  of  the  cogni- 
tive judgment,  and  of  the  presence  and  influence  of  ethical 
and  aesthetical  "  momenta,"  as  are  the  concepts  of  ethics  and 
theology.  At  the  same  time,  no  one  would  think  of  affirming 
that  truths  about  the  movements  and  physical  constitution 
of  the  solar  system  are  discovered  and  expounded  or  de- 
fended with  precisely  the  same  methodology  and  emotional  and 
volitional  accompaniments  as  are  truths  of  duty  and  religion. 
From  such  irremovable  differences  it  follows  that  the  province 
and  values  of  the  sceptical  and  agnostic  attitudes  of  mind  are 
very  different  in  physical  science  and  in  matters  of  conduct, 
faith,  and  worship.  Indeed,  it  is  largely  upon  this  difference 
that  we  have  elsewhere  l  divided  the  whole  subject-matter  of 
science  and  philosophy  into  that  which  concerns  what  is,  the 
Real,  and  that  which  concerns  what  ought  to  be,  or  the  Ideal. 
The  critical  estimate  of  the  scope  and  validity  of  sceptical 
inquiry  and  of  an  agnostic  outcome,  as  concerned  with  these 
two  great  kinds  of  material  for  reflective  thinking,  and  also 
as  concerned  with  all  the  particular  subdivisions  of  these 
kinds,  is  a  theme  for  a  more  special  inquiry  than  that  of  the 
present  treatise.2  On  the  other  hand,  a  history  of  scepticism 
and  agnosticism  is  not  a  part  of  episternology,  however  valu- 
able a  propaedeutic  it  may  be. 

1  Introduction  to  Philosophy,  chapter  viii. :  "  The  Divisions  of  Philosophy." 

2  There  are  few  more  alluring  and  promising  fields  for  a  critical  use  of  the 
reflective  powers  in  which  philosophy  arises  than  those  afforded  just  now  by  the 
physical  and  natural  sciences.     I  have  several  times  already  expressed  my  con- 
viction that  these  sciences  are  more  than  ever  before  full  to  the  brim,  and  ready 
to  burst,  with  ontological  conceptions  and  assumptions  of  most  portentous  dimen- 
sions and  uncertain  validity.     Surely   scepticism  and  agnosticism,  now  nearly 
sated  with  feeding  upon  the  ancient  body  of  alleged  truths  in  ethics  and  religion, 
will  soon  turn  their  devouring  maw  upon  the  structure  generated  and  nourished 
by  the  modern  scientific  spirit  as  dominant  in  chemico-physi'cal  and  biological  re- 
searches.    And  if  the  strength  of  their  appetite  and  the  vigor  of  their  digestion 
remain  unimpaired,  must  we  not  fear  that  even  the  bones  of  this  structure  will 
disappear  from  our  view  ?    Consider,  for  example,  what  would  be  left  of  the  hy- 


SCEPTICISM,   AGNOSTICISM,  AND  CRITICISM        373 

Some  critical  estimate  of  the  sources,  nature,  and  value  of 
the  sceptical  and  agnostic  attitudes  of  mind  toward  cognition, 
as  such,  has  already  been  implied  in  all  the  previous  discus- 
sions. For  it  is  possible  to  doubt  and  to  deny,  or  to  profess 
ignorance,  respecting  the  fraws-subjective  validity  of  cognitive 
faculty  itself.  This  is,  indeed,  a  part  of  the  supreme  activity 
of  the  self-reflective  and  critical  human  mind.  It  is  not 
simply  as  to  the  truthfulness  of  particular  judgments  and  the 
verisimilitude  of  particular  concepts,  but  as  to  the  possibility  of 
attaining  truth  at  all  —  as  to  the  trustworthiness  of  all  mental 
representation  of  the  being  and  transactions  of  the  really 
Existent  —  that  the  extremity  of  scepticism  and  agnosticism 
raises  our  doubts.  In  raising  and  pursuing  these  doubts  the 
mind  makes  its  own  cognitive  processes  its  object  of  cognition. 
It  is  this  very  thing  which  critical  epistemology  proposes  to  do ; 
and  for  this  reason  it  has  been  called  "  science  of  science," 
"  theory  of  knowledge,"  or  Wissenschaftslehre.  It  is  the  em- 
ployment of  a  certain  amount  of  scepticism  which  is  com- 
mended by  the  declaration  that  epistemology  is  the  "  most 
presuppositionless "  of  all  branches  of  philosophy,  the  one 
exercise  of  the  human  mind  in  reflective  thinking  which  in- 
sists upon  starting  with  a  " metaphysical  minimum"  That 
is  to  say,  nothing  is  to  be  assumed  as  true  respecting  the  pro- 
cess or  the  object  involved  in  the  primitive  act  of  cognition, 
except  what,  as  we  immediately  discover,  is  inseparable  mat- 
ter-of-fact belonging  also  to  the  very  proposal  to  undertake 
such  sceptical  examination.  It  is  this  very  plan  which  we 
have  been  following  ;  and  the  result  has  been  to  show  that  all 
scepticism  and  all  agnosticism  are,  even  in  their  most  active 
and  extreme  forms,  self-limiting  and  self-destructive. 

pothesis  of  biological  evolution,  if  a  thorough  critical  and  sceptical  treatment 
were  given  to  its  metaphysical  basis,  its  postulated  ontological  conceptions  and 
assumptions.  Surely,  the  way  in  which  many  students  of  these  sciences  vacillate 
between  the  most  comprehensive  professions  of  knowledge  as  to  what  the  world 
is,  and  how  it  came  to  be,  and  the  most  abject  confessions  of  ignorance,  is  little 
better  than  scandalous. 


374        SCEPTICISM,  AGNOSTICISM,  AND   CRITICISM 

The  sceptical  and  agnostic  attitudes  of  mind  must  not  be 
conceived  of  as  once  for  all  fixed  and  unchanging.  If  to 
these  attitudes  we  add  the  dogmatic  and  critical,  we  have  the 
picture  of  a  ceaseless  shifting  of  what  may  perhaps  be  called 
the  "  temper "  of  affective  consciousness  toward  the  proposi- 
tions in  which  men  express  their  cognitive  judgments.  The 
dogmatic  attitude  of  mind  accepts  these  propositions  without 
previous  sceptical  or  critical  inquiry  into  the  grounds  on 
which  they  rest ;  it,  nevertheless,  holds  them  with  the  warmth 
and  tenacity  of  conviction  that  are  made  thoroughly  rational 
only  as  a  result  of  such  inquiry.  The  sceptical  attitude  be- 
gins by  doubting  the  propositions,  and  by  proposing  to 
examine  the  grounds  of  their  alleged  truthfulness,  while 
maintaining  meantime  a  temper  of  non-assent  toward  them. 
The  attitude  which  avows  nescience,  or  no-knowledge  (a- 
knowledge),  toward  these  propositions  may  be  called  agnostic. 
By  the  critical  attitude  little  else  can  be  meant  than  that  fine 
and  intelligent  balance  in  the  action  of  cognitive  faculty 
which  is  sceptical  before  the  grounds  of  judgment  are  ex- 
amined, and  agnostic  when  the  alleged  grounds  turn  out 
mistaken  or  insufficient ;  but  which  is  equally  ready  positively 
to  affirm,  or  positively  to  deny,  when  the  process  of  inquiry 
has  justified  the  required  cognitive  judgment. 

Now  it  is  obvious  that  there  is  no  kind  of  knowledge,  and 
no  particular  alleged  cognitive  judgment,  toward  which  it  is 
inconceivable  that  all  of  these  attitudes  of  mind  should  be 
assumed  at  different  times.  As  a  matter  of  fact,  different 
minds  do  manage  to  differentiate  themselves  on  occasions 
where  the  feelings  and  practical  interests  as  well  as  the 
amount  of  evidence  "  in  sight "  seem  to  warrant  such  differ- 
entiation, in  accordance  with  all  these  types,  although  respect- 
ing the  same  propositions.  It  is  scarcely  possible  to  throw 
any  cognitive  judgment  into  the  form  of  such  a  proposition 
that  all  men  will  either  accept  or  deny  it ;  or,  perhaps,  will 
consent  to  regard  its  truthfulness  as  doubtful.  And  the  very 


SCEPTICISM,   AGNOSTICISM,  AND  CRITICISM        375 

growth  of  knowledge,  in  the  individual  and  in  the  race,  de- 
pends upon  the  possibility  of  every  individual,  and  of  each 
generation,  changing  somewhat  freely  its  "temper"  of  con- 
sciousness toward  propositions  current  in  the  past.  We  are 
especially  fond  of  boasting  that  the  present  age  is  predomi- 
natingly critical.  It  is,  indeed,  sufficiently  sceptical  and 
agnostic  toward  many  ancient  and  important  truths  (or  al- 
leged truths),  —  especially  those  of  ethics  and  religion.  But 
it  is  also  commendably  anxious  to  weigh  fairly  the  evidence  ; 
and  if  this  evidence  seems  sufficient,  it  is  willing  not  to  per- 
sist unreasonably  in  the  merely  sceptical  or  agnostic  position. 
How  often  do  we  hear  the  Zeitgeist  sincerely  and  pathetically 
lamenting  its  inability,  on  rational  grounds,  to  affirm  knowl- 
edge, or  to  act  in  the  full  faitli  of  truths  that,  nevertheless, 
appear  to  it  to  have  a  high  ideal  value !  Or  else  it  attempts 
that  divorce  of  faith  and  knowledge  which  we  have  already 
declared  to  be  as  mischievous  as  it  is,  in  the  final  issue,  im- 
possible. Thus  it  comes  about  that,  as  never  before,  the 
multitude  of  men  are  sensitive  to  all  the  rapid  changes  of 
objective  temperature ;  they  either  feel  themselves  cooling  off 
toward  some  truth  to  which  they  have  formerly  been  most 
warmly  attached,  or  else  unable  to  resist  the  heating  effect  of 
the  atmosphere  of  opinion  which,  for  the  moment,  has  made 
certain  other  propositions  glow  and  shine  like  the  sun  in  the 
centre  of  the  solar  system.  What  use,  for  example,  nowa- 
days in  expressing  one's  thoughts  upon  any  matter  without 
frequent  phrases,  largely  meaningless,  taken  from  the  theory 
of  biological  evolution  ?  How  many  "  scientific  "  minds  can 
be  found  who  are  daunted  as  quickly  by  the  mysterious  and 
contradictory  attributes  of  the  "  ether,"  as  by  the  difficulties 
attaching  themselves  to  the  current  theological  conceptions 
of  a  Supreme  Being? 

What  is  true  of  the  attitudes  of  scepticism,  agnosticism,  and 
criticism,  with  reference  to  particular  forms  of  the  cognitive 
judgment,  is  true  of  the  same  attitudes  toward  knowledge  in 


376        SCEPTICISM,  AGNOSTICISM,   AND  CRITICISM 

general.  Yet  the  course  of  our  discussion  has  most  clearly 
shown  how,  when  assumed  toward  the  activity  and  the  prod- 
uct of  the  mind  in  all  knowledge,  these  attitudes  are  self- 
limiting  and  self-destructive.  That  is  to  say,  it  has  been 
demonstrated  by  a  critical  examination  that  complete  and  con- 
sistent scepticism  and  agnosticism,  with  reference  to  man's 
power  mentally  to  represent  the  being  and  the  transactions 
of  the  really  Existent,  are  impossible.  The  whole  inquiry, 
then,  becomes  one  respecting  the  limits  of  scepticism  and 
agnosticism,  —  with  respect  to  the  propositions  laid  down  in 
the  course  of  a  critical  epistemology. 

It  is  evident  that  in  dealing  with  epistemological  prob- 
lems, scepticism  quickly  reaches  a  position  in  which  it  is 
strictly  limited,  on  the  one  hand,  by  a  perfectly  clear  and 
indubitable  cognition,  and  on  the  other  hand,  by  a  quite 
irremovable  and  impenetrable  agnosticism.  Agnosticism,  in 
its  turn,  now  appears  as  an  attitude  of  mind  toward  episte- 
mological inquiries  which  can  arrive  at  no  conclusion ;  and 
which  cannot  even  posit  its  own  existence  without  assuming 
both  the  validity  of  knowledge  and  the  rights  of  an  untram- 
melled but  by  no  means  nescient  function  of  scepticism. 
Moreover,  all  this  is  just  as  fundamentally  true  and  impor- 
tant where  the  sceptical  and  agnostic  attitudes  are  the  posi- 
tions of  a  mind  that  proposes  to  transcend,  by  following  the 
critical  path  mapped  out  by  Kant,  the  dogmatism  commonly 
concealed  under  both  these  attitudes.  For  the  more  candid 
and  thorough  our  use  of  criticism  becomes,  the  more  clearly 
does  it  appear  that  epistemological  scepticism  and  agnosti- 
cism have  their  fixed  and  impassable  barriers  in  the  very 
nature  of  cognitive  faculty. 

To  illustrate  the  statements  just  made,  let  us  suppose  that 
the  so-called  "  immediate  "  cognition  of  things  by  the  senses 
is  being  made  the  special  subject  of  a  thoroughly  sceptical 
and  agnostic  treatment.  We  have  "  on  hand,"  so  to  speak, 
the  common-sense  view  of  the  nature,  significance,  and  valid- 


SCEPTICISM,  AGNOSTICISM,   AND  CRITICISM        377 

ity  of  the  perceptive  act.  This  view  assumes  that  things 
really  (that  is,  eatfra-rneiitally)  are  what  they  seem  to  all 
men  to  be.  Or  in  other  words,  things  perceived  and  apper- 
ceived,  things  as  known  by  me  when  I  exercise  my  normal 
powers  of  cognition  through  the  senses,  under  fairly  favorable 
circumstances  (as  respects  degree  of  stimulus,  concentration 
of  attention,  freedom  from  temporary  impairments  or  perma- 
nent unfitness  of  the  organs,  etc.),  are  given  to  me  within  con- 
sciousness "  about  as "  they  really  exist  and  actually  behave 
in  the  world  that  is  out  of  my  consciousness.  [We  have 
designedly  been  thus  indefinite,  because  the  most  dogmatic 
advocate  of  common-sense  realism  will  admit  a  certain  in- 
definite range  of  inaccuracies  and  non-correspondences  be- 
tween things  and  their  mental  copies.]  Now  scepticism 
makes  short  work  of  this  easy-going  common-sense  view  as 
it  is  held  only  by  the  unreflective  mind,  and  yet  as  it  consti- 
tutes the  practical  hypothesis  of  the  most  sceptical  of  episte- 
mological  inquirers.  In  the  name  of  both  psychology  and 
physics,  it  first  attacks  the  so-called  "  secondary  qualities  "  of 
things.  Their  color,  feel,  sound,  smell,  and  taste,  are  all 
resolved  into  subjective  affections  which,  as  described  by 
psychology,  bear  not  the  faintest  resemblance  to  those  causes 
of  the  affections  that,  as  physics  demonstrates  to  its  satis- 
faction, reside  in  the  massive  or  molecular  structure  and 
functions  of  the  physical  world.  If,  at  about  this  point, 
psycho-physics  and  physiological  psychology  take  "  common- 
sense  "  in  hand,  and  subject  its  clearest  deliverances  to  their 
critical  testing,  nothing  is  left  of  the  common-sense  view  of 
perception.  For  science  shows  that  perception  is  not  a  sort 
of  fairly  accurate  "  copying-off,"  brought  about  in  conscious- 
ness through  the  action  of  ready-made  external  things.  And 
when  a  more  critical  psychology,  helped  out  by  the  meta- 
physics of  physics  and  (though  often  without  much  clear 
recognition  of  what  it  is  about)  grown  sensitive  to  considera- 
tions derived  from  a  sceptical  epistemology,  has  discussed  the 


378        SCEPTICISM,  AGNOSTICISM,  AND  CRITICISM 

origin  and  nature  of  the  "  primary  qualities "  of  things,  not 
a  vestige  of  standing-room  seems  left  for  the  most  obvious 
declarations  of  the  "  plain  man's "  consciousness  as  to  his 
sensuous  knowledge  of  things. 

It  is  to  be  noticed,  however,  that  psychology,  psycho- 
physics,  and  physics,  while  they  have  united  in  a  sceptical 
attack  upon  the  ordinary  view  of  the  cognition  of  things,  as  a 
valid  representation  of  trans-subjective  qualities  and  relations, 
have  all  the  while  been  indulging  themselves  in  a  dogmatism 
of  their  own.  It  is  altogether  likely  that  they  have  done  this 
with  some  unseemly  vociferation  against  the  presence  in  these 
"  sciences "  of  the  least  taint  of  metaphysics  or  of  episte- 
mology.  Yet  no  writers  have,  on  the  whole,  been  more 
crudely  dogmatic  in  respect  of  their  noetic  and  ontological 
conceptions  and  assumptions  than  have  those  whose  avowed 
aim  has  been  to  treat  psychical  phenomena  from  the  stand- 
point of  a  science  that  is  sceptical  as  to  all  the  ultimate  prob- 
lems. Let,  now,  the  sceptical  inquiry  be  pushed  forward  into 
that  mass  of  alleged  cognitions  as  to  the  constitution  and  be- 
havior of  things  which  modern  science  has  substituted  for 
those  sense-percepts  that  men,  in  general,  find  given  to  their 
mind.  The  imagination  of  the  most  myth-making  of  the 
ancients,  or  the  untrained  fancy  of  the  most  superstitious 
of  the  savages,  has  never  resulted  in  so  marvellous  and  sur- 
prising a  picture  of  the  "  unsenscd  "  reality  of  things.  It  is 
confessedly  impossible  to  recognize  in  these  things,  as  they 
are,  the  prototypes  of  things  as  ive  know  them  in  our  work-a- 
day  life.  Yet  this  world  of  scientific  discovery  is  the  pro- 
posed substitute  for  the  world  of  common-sense.  That  very 
sceptical  process,  which  has  resulted  in  the  destruction  of  our 
confidence  in  so-called  common-sense,  has  been  accompanied 
by  a  more  or  less  dogmatic  construction  of  an  extra-mentolly 
real  world,  which  is  now  relied  upon  to  explain  the  world  of 
common-sense,  and  at  the  same  time  to  serve  as  a  barrier 
against  the  march  of  scepticism  forward  to  a  completely  agnos- 


SCEPTICISM,   AGNOSTICISM,   AND  CRITICISM        379 

tic  outcome.  From  a  world  which  all  men  immediately  know 
and  believe  in,  we  have  been  led  by  scepticism  to  a  world 
about  which  we  indirectly  know  and  believe  in  anything 
whatever  only  as  we  trust  the  intellectual  processes  of  others, 
under  the  principles  of  identity  and  of  sufficient  reason.  What 
now  if  scepticism,  recognizing  that  it  has  been  cheated  of  its 
full  rights,  attacks  the  validity  of  these  principles,  and  so 
threatens  the  reality  of  the  world  which  imagination  and 
thought  have  constructed  by  following  them  ? 

And  now  the  destructive  work  of  sceptical  inquiry  begins 
over  again.  But  its  field  of  inquiry  is  changed  to  that 
realm  of  lofty  imaginings,  abstract  conceptions,  and  gen- 
eralized formulas,  for  which  science  holds  itself  responsible. 
Its  structures,  although  built  by  a  community  of  stout  hearts 
and  skilful  hands  and  noble  purposes,  are  even  frailer  on 
some  sides  than  are  those  products  of  sense  which  have 
been,  often  so  inadvertently,  called  "  illusory  "  and  "  unreal." 
Once  more,  however,  as  has  already  been  shown,  a  limit 
is  reached  beyond  which  scepticism  cannot  go.  There  is 
in  my  perceptive  consciousness  that  which,  somehow  and  at 
some  first  time,  I  have  come,  indubitably  and  with  the  clear- 
est cognition,  to  recognize  as  not  merely  the  state  of  my 
consciousness  but  as  known  certainly  and  immediately  to  be 
" not-me"  Here  scepticism  meets  the  insuperable  barrier  of 
a  positive  Somewhat  that  is  in  consciousness  but  is  not  the 
mere  product  of  consciousness,  —  that  is  subjective,  because 
it  is  an  object  of  my  cognition,  and  yet  is  trans-subjective, 
because  it  is  the  cognized  "  opposite  "  of  the  Self.  That  such 
a  limit  is  actually  set  to  the  sceptical  treatment  of  the  knowl- 
edge of  things  by  the  senses,  and  that  it  is  applicable  to  all 
botli  normal  and  abnormal  processes  of  perception,  has  been 
shown  to  be  true,  over  and  over  again. 

But  it  is  equally  plain  that  the  sceptical  inquiry  must  be 
accompanied,  from  its  point  of  starting  to  its  final  issue,  by 
confessions  of  ignorance  or  nescience  that  cannot,  all  of 


380        SCEPTICISM,   AGNOSTICISM,   AND  CRITICISM 

them,  be  considered  as  temporary  or  unimportant  in  respect 
of  the  nature  and  growth  of  knowledge.  For  if  I  stop  at  any 
stage  of  the  sceptical  inquiry  to  ask  after  explanations  for 
all  that  I  seem  to  know,  or  for  all  that  I  know  I  doubt,  the 
only  answer  which  can  be  truthfully  given  must  often  be, 
"  I  do  not  know."  And  at  the  end  of  the  most  candid  and 
thorough  criticism  of  cognitive  faculty,  it  must  be  replied  to 
a  vast  number  of  particular  questions,  though  falling  under  a 
few  general  classes,  that  such  things  are  not  given  or  per- 
mitted to  man  to  know.  From  this  it  follows,  as  a  matter 
both  of  theoretical  economy  and  of  practical  wisdom,  that  the 
mind  should  recognize  the  unreason  and  the  absurdity  of  even 
attempting  to  answer  certain  inquiries.  Both  science  and 
scepticism  —  however  paradoxical  the  statement  may  seem  — 
appear  to  be  constantly  limited  by  nescience.  The  very 
nature  and  the  laws  of  the  development  of  knowledge  itself 
require  us  to  learn  to  say,  "  I  do  not  know."  And  where 
the  experience  of  the  race  is  sufficiently  clear  and  cumulative, 
the  spirit  of  philosophical  criticism  is  not  violated  by  saying : 
"I  do  not  think  that  any  man  will  ever  know,  or  that  the 
human  mind  is  capable  of  knowing." 

For  example,  something  of  this  sort  seems  necessarily  to 
be  true  in  respect  of  all  human  knowledge  of  things,  whether 
immediate  through  the  senses,  or  indirect  and  inferential  as 
a  body  of  accumulated  information  about  things  in  terms  of 
physical  science.  This  is  true  of  the  dicta  of  the  most  ordi- 
nary common-sense.  "  Sugar  is  sweet ; "  but  "  lemons  are 
sour : "  "  The  grass  is  green  ; "  but  "  the  heavens  are  blue, 
with  whitish  or  blackish  clouds  scattered  here  and  there." 
But  why  is  the  sugar  sweet  and  the  lemon  sour,  the  grass 
green,  and  the  sky  blue,  but  the  cloud  white  or  gray  ?  Com- 
mon-sense is  nescient  in  answer  to  these  inquiries,  and  must 
ever  remain  so.  Or  it  may  substitute  teleological  reasons  for 
causal  action,  and  thus  explain  further  from  another  point  of 
view ;  but  nothing  characteristic  of  the  constitution  of  these 


SCEPTICISM,   AGNOSTICISM,  AND  CRITICISM         381 

objects,  which  shall  determine  the  effects  they  have  upon  our 
consciousness,  appears  to  the  observer  who  maintains  the 
point  of  view  of  ordinary  perception.  Science,  however, 
attempts  the  answers  to  such  questions.  For  one  of  them  it 
proposes  an  elaborate  theory  of  optics  with  measurements  of 
wave-lengths  in  the  hypothetical  substrate  called  ether  (a 
most  marvellous  being)  ;  this  theory  it  joins  on  to  a  more 
doubtful  theory  of  the  chemico-physical  value  of  pigments 
in  the  retina  of  the  eye  ;  and  it  then  finds  its  way  fur- 
ther by  the  path  of  an  even  more  doubtful  theory  of  nerve- 
commotions  in  certain  cerebral  centres,  where,  alas !  every- 
thing disappears  from  the  view  of  the  scientific  observer  in 
a  bottomless  pit  of  metaphysics  concerning  the  "  relations " 
of  matter  and  mind.  And  as  to  the  scientific  explanation 
of  the  ordinary  sensations  of  taste,  nothing  is  known  worth 
seriously  taking  into  account. 

Suppose,  however,  that  we  had  all  such  mysteries  cleared 
up,  and  a  straight  and  traceable  path  laid  from  the  centre  of 
the  solar  system,  or  from  the  piece  of  matter  put  into  the 
mouth,  to  the  psychoses  of  visual  or  gustatory  sort.  This 
would  indeed  be  a  splendid  and  highly  desirable  extension  of 
scientific  knowledge ;  but  it  would  also  extend  correspond- 
ingly the  sphere  over  which  the  darkness  of  an  impenetrable 
nescience  would  reign.  Why  should  a  particular  wave-length 
of  luminiferous  ether,  after  getting  itself  translated  in  the 
form  of  definite  determinations  of  chemico-physical  processes 
and  specific  kinds  of  nerve-commotions,  be  finally  correlated 
with  sensations  of  blue,  green,  white,  black,  etc. ;  while  other 
disturbances  of  the  molecules  of  ordinary  matter,  after  excit- 
ing similar  chemico-physical  and  neural  changes,  appear  in 
consciousness  with  representative  psychoses  of  the  quite  dif- 
ferent olfactory  or  gustatory  order  ?  To  questions  of  this 
kind  the  growing  science  of  sense-perception  offers  no  an- 
swer; and  there  is  little  or  no  prospect  of  any  successful 
attempt,  in  the  remotest  future,  at  any  answer.  Or,  at  least, 


382        SCEPTICISM,   AGNOSTICISM,  AND  CRITICISM 

if  these  or  any  other  more  precise  terms  in  which  the  prob- 
lems are  proposed  for  explanation  should  receive  light  from 
the  discovery  of  new  facts,  the  expanding  domain  of  certified 
knowledge  would  still  be  given  to  us  as  covering  a  bottomless 
abyss  of  unexplained  and  inexplicable  facts.  All  answers  to 
the  question  Why  ?  as  applied  to  the  correlation  of  particular 
facts,  leave  us  in  the  agnostic  attitude  as  to  the  ultimate  rea- 
sons for  the  correlation  itself.  We  know  that  so  it  is;  but 
why  it  is  so,  we  neither  know  nor  discern  any  prospect  of 
knowing.  Indeed,  as  there  has  already  been  occasion  to  re- 
mark before,  the  progress  of  modern  science  is  extending  the 
realm  of  accepted  but  unexplained  facts  far  faster  than  the 
correlation  of  those  facts  under  either  old  or  new  princi- 
ples of  explanation.  And  thus  the  very  nature  of  knowledge 
is  such  that  the  limit  of  all  sceptical  inquiry  is  set  in  the 
confession  of  mystery  and  of  nescience,  as  well  as  in  the  pro- 
fession of  formulas  under  which  the  facts  may  be  regarded 
as  sequences  from  some  common  ground. 

When,  too,  attention  is  turned  from  the  particular  facts  to 
those  generalized  modes  of  the  behavior  of  things  which  are 
called  "  natural  laws,"  the  most  sceptical  inquiry  appears  lim- 
ited, on  the  one  hand,  by  assured  and  trustworthy  cognitions, 
and,  on  the  other  hand,  by  a  complete  and  seemingly  perma- 
nent condition  of  nescience.  This  appears  the  more  strange 
from  the  point  of  view  held  by  science  as  to  the  nature  and 
signification  of  the  causal  principle.  Why  violets  should 
emit  one  characteristic  odor,  and  the  reddish-brown  substance 
obtained  from  a  bag  behind  the  navel  of  the  male  of  a  certain 
species  of  deer  should  emit  a  quite  different  but  equally  char- 
acteristic odor,  is  not  a  question  that  science  can  at  present 
satisfactorily  answer.  Scientific  curiosity  would  be  gratified, 
however,  if  these  facts  could  be  brought  into  connection  with 
others,  and  if  some  so-called  law  of  the  chemical  constitution 
of  odors  could  be  brought  to  light. 

When  we  ask  why  the  arrow  shot  from  the  bow,  or  the 


SCEPTICISM,   AGNOSTICISM,  AND  CRITICISM        383 

stone  loosened  from  the  coping,  or  the  meteor  caught  within 
the  magic  influences  of  this  terrestrial  sphere,  all  agree  in 
falling,  although  by  very  different  lines,  to  the  ground,  the 
law  of  gravitation  is  the  answer  to  the  inquiry  for  all  three. 
And  not  only  so,  but  also  does  this  law  embrace  in  its  com- 
pelling folds  the  planets  and  their  satellites,  and  even  some 
of  the  remoter  stars.  But  why  should  masses  of  matter 
attract  each  other  at  all  ;  and  why  directly  as  the  mass  and 
inversely  as  the  square  of  their  distance  apart,  rather  than 
in  accordance  with  any  one  of  an  indefinite  number  of  other 
different  formulas  ?  In  spite  of  the  many  and  persistent 
efforts  made  to  answer  this  question,  there  is  still  only  one 
answer  possible :  "  We  do  not  know  ;  and  we  have  not  the 
least  glimmer  of  a  reason  why."  Just  such  a  confession 
of  nescience  must  always  limit  that  knowledge  with  which 
science  puts  us  into  possession  in  the  shape  of  its  so-called 
laws.  Concerning  the  causal  explanation  of  the  most  assured 
and  triumphant  generalizations  of  science,  our  agnosticism 
is  as  complete  and  invincible  as  it  is  concerning  the  most 
startling  and  unique  exceptions  to  those  laws.  The  law 
of  gravitation  is  as  mysterious  as  is  the  exceptional  be- 
havior of  "1830  Groombridge"  in  apparent  contravention 
of  that  law.  The  expanding  of  water  at  just  the  degree  of 
32  Fahr.  is  actually  no  more  an  incomprehensible  puzzle  in 
etiology  than  is  its  contraction  all  the  way  from  212°  Fahr. 
down  to  that  degree. 

Common-sense — it  was  said  some  time  ago  —  "may  sub- 
stitute teleological  reasons  for  causal  action,  and  thus  explain 
further  from  another  point  of  view."  Science  is  accustomed 
to  proclaim  that  it  cannot  take  this  other  point  of  view.  It 
must  confine  itself  to  asking  why,  in  a  way  to  indicate  the  need 
of  complicating  further  the  mechanism,  unless  the  new  fact 
can  be  brought  into  terms  of  harmony  with  the  formulas  gen- 
eralized from  other  facts.  Common-sense  is  often  satisfied 
with  the  naive  suggestion  that,  perhaps,  some  good  end  may 


384        SCEPTICISM,   AGNOSTICISM,   AND   CRITICISM 

be  reached  by  departing  from  the  strict  and  unswerving  appli- 
cation of  the  general  formula.  It  may  be,  for  example,  that 
the  ideal  purpose  of  the  universe  will  be  better  served  if  all  the 
members  of  the  solar  system  do,  for  a  very  long  series  of  ages, 
obey  the  law  of  gravitation,  and  if  1830  Groombridge  does 
not.  Or  if  water  follows  the  law  of  contracting  down  to  about 
32°  Fahr.,  and  then  —  "He  knows  why"  —  all  of  a  sudden 
departs  from  that  law,  the  earth  will  be  more  fit  for  the  habi- 
tation of  man,  etc.  And  here  a  flood  of  light  upon  the  physi- 
cal constitution  of  things,  as  it  is  actually  known  to  exist, 
seems  to  burst  in  upon  the  sensitive  mind.  Such  anthropo- 
morphism the  strictly  scientific  construction  of  the  nature  of 
Reality  refuses  to  accept.  Science  has  its  own  limits  to  its 
own  anthropomorphism ;  and  these  compel  it  to  avow  an 
agnostic  attitude  of  mind  toward  the  ultimate  reason  and 
significance  of  all  natural  laws.  But,  here  again,  it  has  been 
clearly  shown  that  the  conceptions  employed  in  the  statement 
of  these  laws,  as  well  as  the  relations  affirmed  in  the  several 
combinations  of  the  conceptions,  are  all  patterned  after  the 
analogy  of  the  most  fundamental  experiences  of  the  self- 
conscious  Self.  The  only  way,  then,  to  validate  these  laws 
for  a  really  existent  World  of  things  is  to  accept  the  postu- 
late that  its  being  and  transactions  are  somehow  truly  repre- 
sented in  human  experience. 

In  this  way,  then,  does  the  weary  dove,  sent  through  that 
window  of  the  senses  which  opens  toward  the  endless  expanse 
of  unexplored  waters,  return  to  its  own  ark  within  the  soul 
of  man.  The  so-called  illusions  of  the  world  of  sense  are 
known  as  illusions  only  if  our  sceptical  examination  of  the 
sensuous  deliverances  is  constantly  accompanied  and  justified 
by  a  faith  in  human  cognitive  powers.  And  after  this  faith 
itself,  and  the  grounds  on  which  it  reposes,  and  the  springs 
from  which  it  proceeds  to  enlarge  the  sphere  of  science,  have 
been  subjected  to  sceptical  inquiry,  the  barriers  that  are  a 
combination  of  indubitable  cognition  and  irremovable  nesci- 


SCEPTICISM,   AGNOSTICISM,  AND  CRITICISM        385 

ence,  are  only  pushed  a  little  way  further  back.  Thus  the 
final  state  of  the  case  is  reached,  and  the  last  word  which  a 
critical  philosophy  of  knowledge  can  utter  is  spoken.  The 
soul  knows  itself  with  an  increasing  clearness  and  fulness  of 
content ;  and  it  knows  that  somewhat  not  itself  is  given  to  it 
to  know,  with  all  its  own  powers  sharing  duly  in  the  activities 
of  sense-perception.  Such  are  the  limits  of  its  scepticism  both 
by  positive  cognition  and  by  nescience.  TJte  limits  of  its  positive 
knowledge  are  extended  only  upon  these  terms,  —  that  it  accept 
these  objects  of  its  knowledge  as  somehow  forming  a  unitary 
system  for  the  communication  of  this  other  and  larger  Self 
with  its  own  Self. 

After  what  has  been  said  in  the  preceding  chapters  *  it  is 
scarcely  necessary  to  discuss  in  detail  the  self-limiting  nature 
of  scepticism  and  agnosticism  as  applied  to  the  epistemologi- 
cal  problem  of  self-knowledge.  Here  the  sceptical  attitude 
very  speedily  receives  a  check  to  its  progress  in  any  direction. 
Do  I  raise  and  maintain  a  doubt  as  to  the  here-and-now 
being  of  my  Self?  Whatever  my  general  epistemological 
position  may  be,  and  whatever  interpretation  I  may  give  to  the 
conceptions  current  in  every  form  of  metaphysical  discussion, 
—  even  the  most  agnostic  and  scornful,  —  there  are  fixed 
limits  for  this  region  within  which  doubt  cannot  even  lift  up 
its  head.  Whatever  you  mean  by  "  knowledge,"  in  that 
meaning,  at  the  worst,  I  know  that  I  here  and  now  am. 
Whatever  your  conception  of  "  being,"  you  cannot  deny  the 
validity  of  the  proposition,  I  here  and  now  am.  The  same 
thing  is  true  concerning  the  remembered  existence  of  Self. 
Meaning  for  the  word  "  knowledge,"  or  material  for  the  most 
meagre  conception  of  any  sort  of  "  existence,"  cannot  be  had 
without  admitting  so  much  of  indubitable  self-cognition  as 
this.  But  this  is  itself,  at  one  and  the  same  time,  the  indubi- 
table affirmation  of  a  positive  knowledge,  and  the  setting  of  a 
limit  of  nescience  to  the  process  of  sceptical  inquiry. 

i  See  also  "  Philosophy  of  Miad,"  chapters  iii.-vi.,  and  xi. 
25 


386        SCEPTICISM,   AGNOSTICISM,   AND   CRITICISM 

The  limits  of  both  indubitable  conviction  and  of  nescience 
must,  so  far  as  we  have  any  present  information,  or  prospect  of 
information  in  time  to  come,  be  recognized  as  absolutely  irre- 
movable. They  belong,  indeed,  to  the  very  nature  and  growth 
of  cognitive  faculty.  The  cognitive  judgments  in  which  are 
expressed  the  answers  to  the  questions,  "  Do  I  here  and  now 
exist  ? "  "  Did  I  exist  in  that  yesterday,  when,  as  I  remem- 
ber, I  thought,  felt,  or  acted  in  such  a  manner  ?  "  "  Have  I, 
in  any  sort,  been  one  and  the  same  Self  from  the  remembered 
'  then  '  to  the  self-conscious  '  now  '  ? " —  are  so  clear  and  posi- 
tive that  no  higher  standpoint,  or  profounder  and  more  compre- 
hensive view  of  truth  and  reality,  can  possibly  be  gained  from 
which  to  gainsay  or  dispute  these  judgments.  They  fix  the 
irremovable  barriers  to  scepticism  in  its  attack  upon  the 
truth  of  self-knowledge.  But  as  we  contemplate  these  ques- 
tions and  their  indubitable  answers  critically,  we  find  both 
questions  and  answers  freighted  with  a  great  load  of  mys- 
teries, which  psychology,  epistemology,  and  metaphysics  are 
by  their  combined  efforts  quite  impotent  to  lessen  or  to 
remove.  Nothing  remains  for  us  but  the  answers  "  I  do  not 
know,"  and  "  Knowledge  here  seems  denied  to  all  men,"  when 
these  questions  are  proposed. 

How  is  memory  at  all  possible,  —  that  present  phase  of  con- 
sciousness which  carries  with  it  the  unique  guarantee  of  an 
existence  of  Self  and  of  Things  in  the  past,  and  so  itself 
makes  possible  a  continuity  both  of  cognitive  development  and 
also  of  the  being  of  the  objects  of  cognition  ?  Psychology  is 
destined  to  remain  agnostic  in  answer  to  this  question.  The 
wisest  students  of  mental  phenomena  are  the  readiest,  not  to 
place  its  ultimate  solution  in  "  brain-memory  "  or  in  experi- 
mental determination  of  the  "  laws  of  association,"  but  to 
confess  nescience  when  problems  of  this  order  are  proposed 
for  scientific  treatment.  How,  indeed,  in  the  last  analysis,  is 
knowledge  possible  ;  and  who  will  vouch  for  the  extra-mental 
validity  of  that  primitive  and  fundamental  conviction  which  is 


SCEPTICISM,   AGNOSTICISM,   AND  CRITICISM        387 

furnished  by  the  mental  process  of  knowledge  itself  ?  From 
the  point  of  view  of  genetic  psychology  we  may  expound  and 
glorify  the  descriptive  history  of  cognitive  faculty.  From  the 
point  of  view  of  epistemology  we  may  analyze  and  discuss  criti- 
cally the  maturing  functions  and  the  necessary  implicates  of 
this  faculty.  But  the  results  of  all  this  must  be  expressed  in 
a  series  of  propositions  :  "  I  know,"  or  "  I  do  not  know  ; "  "I 
think  or  opine  this ;  "  or  "  I  do  not  think,  and  guess  not,  that." 
Such  is  the  nature  of  the  science  of  psychology,  and  such  is 
the  nature  of  the  philosophy  of  knowledge.  Nor  does  psy- 
chology differ  in  this  respect  from  other  sciences,  or  episte- 
mology from  other  branches  of  philosophy.  Yet  the  more 
intense  and  thorough  scientific  inquiry  becomes,  the  quicker 
does  it  pass  over  the  road  that  leads  at  last  to  the  veil  through 
which  man  cannot  see.  The  only  answer  now  left  to  the 
causal  "Why?"  is  a  confession  of  nescience.  "I  do  not 
know"  is  all  that  science  or  philosophy  can  say  to  inquiries 
after  further  explanations  under  this  principle.  But  if  we 
will  admit  to  the  confidences  of  our  speculative  thinking  the 
question  of  the  teleological  "  Why  ? "  we  may  perhaps  frame  a 
rational  hypothesis  as  to  what  lies  beyond  that  veil. 

Epistemological  agnosticism,  like  sceptical  inquiry,  is  by 
nature  self-limiting ;  it  is  also  encompassed  by  the  limits  on 
the  one  hand  of  assured  cognitions,  and  on  the  other  hand  of 
reasonable  and  helpful  faiths  and  practical  postulates.  In- 
deed, in  pursuing  the  course  of  sceptical  and  presupposition- 
less  inquiry  through  all  the  chapters  of  this  book,  we  have 
been  setting  positive  and  invincible  limitations  to  epistemo- 
logical  agnosticism.  More  than  once  lias  it  appeared  that  the 
alternative  reached  by  a  course  of  reasoning  which  is  conse- 
quential, and  which  goes  to  the  heart  of  the  ultimate  prob- 
lems, forces  this  alternative :  Either  an  agnosticism  which 
amounts  to  complete  philosophical  nihilism,  and  which  ends 
in  absurdity  so  absolute  as  to  be  unstatable,  or  else  the  ad- 
mission that  human  knowledge  guarantees  the  transcendental 


388         SCEPTICISM,  AGNOSTICISM,  AND  CRITICISM 

use  and  validity  of  the  categories  and  of  the  ontological  im- 
plicates which  analysis  shows  to  be  necessary  "  momenta  "  of 
all  knowledge.  As  the  ultimate  outcome  of  epistemological 
criticism  it  has  appeared  that  the  extremest  form  of  the 
agnostic  proposition  itself  assumes  a  whole  World  of  Reality, 
—  Self  and  not-selves  interrelated  in  <?Mcm-systematic  fashion, 
which  may  be  truthfully  represented  by  the  human  mind. 

For  let  us  now  briefly  reconsider  the  different  meanings 
which  it  is  possible  to  give  to  the  "  cognitive  judgment "  of  the 
agnostic.  Certainly  his  judgment  bears  a  distinctly  cognitive 
form  ;  since  its  proposition  is,  not  merely  "  I  doubt,"  but  in  its 
minimum  of  trans-subjective  reference,  "  I  do  not  know."  But 
this  "  i-do-not-know  "  is  itself  an  experience  which  is  preg- 
nant with  meaning  only  as  it  carries  within  itself  all  the  life 
from  which  springs  a  world  of  transcendent  reality.  For 
the  "  I "  which  avows  itself  to  be  in  this  state  of  nescience  is 
as  truly  a  self-known  Self  as  is  the  confident  Ego  of  the  most 
credulous  dogmatist.  The  state  of  nescience,  or  wow-knowl- 
edge, in  which  it  knows  itself  to  be  is  meaningless  except 
as  contrasted  with  the  memory-image  of  previous  states  of 
knowledge.  Indeed,  so  far  as  epistemology,  in  distinction  from 
psychology  and  logic,  is  concerned,  the  judgment  "  I-do-not- 
know  "  is  not  to  be  distinguished,  with  respect  to  its  grounds 
or  its  implicates,  from  the  judgment  "  I-know."  Now,  it  has 
been  explained  in  great  detail  that  all  cognitive  judgment 
necessarily  implies  the  existence  of  a  number  of  beings  other 
than  the  Self,  to  some  of  whom  —  namely,  the  other  selves  — 
it  always  appeals,  as  furnishing  in  their  nature  common  char- 
acteristics with  our  own,  and  thus  as  acknowledging  with  us 
some  objective  standard  of  truth  ;  so  that  the  "  I-do-not-know  " 
is  an  affirmation  of  an  experience  which  is  as  truly  transcen- 
dent, in  a  legitimate  sense  of  that  word,  as  any  cognitive 
experience  can  possibly  be. 

"  I  do  not  know  "  may  be  a  sincerely  modest  and  truthful 
affirmation  of  the  experience  of  the  individual  cognitive  soul ; 


SCEPTICISM,  AGNOSTICISM,   AND  CRITICISM         389 

and  it  may  be  accompanied  by  the  proper  feelings,  and  made 
in  a  commendable  spirit,  when  applied  to  problems  of  episte- 
mology.  It  may  signify  a  state  of  nescience,  out  of  which  the 
soul  may  reasonably  expect  to  emerge,  if  only  it  will  follow 
good  guidance  along  the  path  of  self-criticism.  Even  if  any 
individual  agnostic  prefers  to  plunge  sideways  out  of  this  path 
of  careful  inquiry,  in  the  faith  that  he  may  somehow  "  feel " 
his  way  to  shelter  from  the  gathering  storm,  his  case  is  not 
hopeless.  For,  as  will  soon  be  shown  clearly,  all  cognition 
has  its  teleological  aspect  and  its  ethical  and  aesthetical 
factors ;  and,  although  self-knowledge  is  the  only  sure  path 
to  the  truth  about  all  knowledge,  many  men  are,  by  constitu- 
tion or  by  habit,  not  of  robust  frame  and  steady  head  enough 
to  climb  the  heights  of  assurance  by  this  path.  So,  then,  the 
experience  of  all  alike,  when  the  narrative  of  that  experience 
is  finally  made  up  and  fully  disclosed,  teaches  the  same  truth 
with  regard  to  the  limits  of  agnosticism. 

Suppose,  however,  —  and  this  is  for  the  most  part  the  case 
of  the  avowed  agnostic  regarding  epistemological  problems, — 
that  the  judgment  affirming  nescience  means  somewhat  more 
than  appears  upon  its  surface.  Now,  this  "  I-do-not-know " 
may  mean  also  "  You  do  not  know,"  and  even  "  Nobody 
knows,  or  ever  will  know,  or  ever  can  know."  This  is  nesci- 
ence venturing  into  the  field  of  epistemological  philosophy, 
and  laying  down  a  universal  proposition.  But  it  requires  no 
critical  insight,  or  work  of  analysis,  in  order  to  show  that  such 
nescience  is  the  most  self-confident  and  comprehensive  kind 
of  knowledge,  if  only  it  be  regarded  from  certain  perfectly 
unprejudiced  points  of  view.  Such  an  agnostic  may  always 
be  asked,  with  the  most  complacent  of  countenances,  "  What 
is  it  that  you  and  I  and  all  men  are  constitutionally  doomed 
to  remain  ignorant  about  ?  "  The  reply,  if  it  is  to  be  stated 
in  terms  that  can  be  defended,  cannot  possibly  include  any  of 
those  laws,  factors,  implicates,  or  faiths  and  postulates,  which 
our  previous  critical  discussion  has  shown  to  belong  of  invin- 


390        SCEPTICISM,   AGNOSTICISM,  AND  CRITICISM 

cible  right  to  all  human  knowledge.  Indeed  such  an  agnostic 
assumes  to  know  even  more  than  our  presuppositionless  theory 
of  knowledge  undertakes  to  guarantee  :  Other  minds  exist,  and 
are  subject  to  like  limitations  with  the  mind  of  the  agnostic ; 
the  laws  of  these  minds,  and  the  cognitive  relations  they  bear 
to  that  Reality  which  even  the  Unknown,  the  X,  is  assumed 
to  have,  are  going  to  remain  forever  unchanged  ;  the  nature 
of  these  minds  and  of  their  cognitive  processes,  together  with 
the  appropriate  feelings  of  doubt  and  despair,  have  already 
been  explored  so  deeply  and  tested  so  thoroughly  that  no 
more  of  latent  vital  capacity  for  cognition  is  even  to  be  sus- 
pected. Moreover,  there  is  assumed  a  positive  and  conclu- 
sive knowledge  that  the  common  mental  representation  of  the 
reality  of  the  world  of  things  is  not  indeed  what  it  claims  to 
be,  —  namely,  cognition  ;  it  is  mere  sensation,  mere  ideation, 
mere  abstract  thinking,  and  cannot  be  the  truth  in  the  sense 
which  men  usually  attach  to  that  word.  But  who  does  not 
see  that  so  much  nescience  as  this  involves  a  vast  amount 
of  the  most  positive  and  comprehensive  propositions,  which, 
instead  of  confessing  a  sceptical  attitude  of  mind  toward 
Truth  and  Reality,  the  rather  manifest  an  attitude  of  extreme 
dogmatism  concealed  under  agnostic  guise  ? 

If,  however,  the  more  absolute  and  universal  agnostic  for- 
mulas are  understood  as  limited  in  relation  to  the  positive 
content  and  proper  implicates  of  all  knowledge,  they  take  on  a 
totally  different  character.  That  not  a  few  questions  may  be 
asked  about  knowledge  and  reality  to  which  the  reply  must 
always  be  an  unequivocal  declaration  of  nescience,  few 
students  of  epistemology  and  metaphysics  would  think  of 
denying.  Epistemology  and  metaphysics  concur  in  showing 
that  this  is  necessarily  so.  But  here  again  these  very  scepti- 
cal inquiries  and  their  agnostic  answers  are  based  upon  a 
foundation  of  assured,  positive  knowledge.  Some  things  I 
know  indubitably  in  answer  to  the  sceptical  inquiry  as  to  the 
Being  of  the  really  Existent ;  some  things  also  as  to  what 


SCEPTICISM,  AGNOSTICISM,  AND  CRITICISM        391 

Knowledge  is,  and  as  to  what  of  Reality  my  knowledge  impli- 
cates and  guarantees.  Without  recognition  of  these  fixed 
points,  as  it  were,  in  the  flux  of  the  cognitive  processes,  the 
agnostic  answers  to  other  questions  could  neither  be  reached 
nor  even  stated. 

To  return  now  to  the  illustration  of  which  Kant  makes,  for 
his  theory  of  nescience,  such  telling  use :  It  appears  that  the 
case  as  between  our  cognitive  minds  and  the  transcendental 
being  of  the  world  is  not  at  all  as  this  great  thinker  made  it  to 
be.  The  island  of  our  cognition  is  not  a  well-defined  amount 
of  ready-made  "  stuff,"  already  completely  explored  by  episte- 
rnology  and  mapped  out  in  unobjectionable  and  unalterable 
outlines,  within  which  no  increment  of  extra-mental  existence 
can,  as  it  were,  enter.  Nor  does  Reality  stand  related  to  this 
island  of  cognition  as  a  boundless  and  wholly  impenetrable 
ocean,  forever  covered  with  a  veil  of  mist  and  fog.  What 
Kant  means  by  "  the  island  "  is  an  ever-expanding  life  of  the 
Self ;  and  this  life  may  —  it  is,  at  least,  conceivable  — extend  its 
self-knowledge  indefinitely ;  but  it  always  knows  itself  as  real 
and  as  standing  in  actually  experienced  relations  to  a  system 
of  other  beings,  that  are  known  as  not-itself.  Instead,  then, 
of  the  island  being  impenetrable  to  Reality,  its  very  life  and 
growth  consists  in  processes  of  the  absorption  and  assimila- 
tion, so  to  speak,  of  the  real  with  the  expanding  Self.  And 
the  surrounding  ocean  is  thereby  more  and  more  cleared  up 
for  vision  from  that  island,  if  only  one  will  take  the  loftier 
and  more  cloudless  points  of  view.  For  the  ocean  and  the 
island  are,  indeed,  not  throughout  to  be  identified  ;  neither  do 
they  run  parallel  to  each  other,  like  the  two  tracks  of  a  rail- 
road bed.  But  they  are  parts  of  one  World ;  and  they  are 
known  in  one  experience  as  belonging  to  the  unitary  Being 
of  that  one  world.  And  what  the  nature  of  the  ocean  is, 
beyond  the  many  inlets  and  bays  with  which  it  interpenetrates 
the  island,  and  beyond  the  line  where  the  fog  and  mist  re- 
treat on  the  sunniest  of  our  days,  may  be  conjectured,  bravely 


392        SCEPTICISM,  AGNOSTICISM,   AND  CRITICISM 

and  rationally,  from  these  better  points  of  view.  For  the 
faith  which  takes  us  through  the  fog  and  the  mist  is  not  of  the 
nature  of  an  irrational  plunge  into  a  tide  where  no  swimmer 
can  hope  to  survive ;  it  is  only,  after  all,  of  a  nature  common 
to  the  postulate  of  an  analogy  between  the  Self  and  its 
World,  —  by  confidence  in  which  all  the  particular  sciences 
progressively  make  conquests  of  this  one  world. 

It  appears,  then,  that  the  sceptical  and  agnostic  attitudes 
of  mind  toward  truth  in  general,  as  well  as  toward  those  par- 
ticular truths  in  the  establishment  and  critical  reconstruction 
of  which  the  very  growth  of  the  body  of  science  consists, 
belong  to  the  life  of  the  cognitive  soul;  but  they  are  not 
attitudes  in  which  the  soul  may  rest  and  be  satisfied  with 
conclusions  that  follow  upon  the  view  of  experience  from 
these  attitudes  alone.  Scepticism,  or  that  inquiry  which 
originates  in  the  spirit  of  doubt  before  the  propositions  of  an 
uncritical  dogmatism,  is  the  fit  incitement,  the  rational  priv- 
ilege, and  the  seal  of  dignity,  for  human  knowledge.  It  is 
limited  both  by  that  fuller  and  more  certain  cognition,  and 
also  by  that  enlightened  agnosticism  to  which  it  points  out 
the  way. 

"It  is  man's  privilege  to  doubt, 
If  so  be  that  from  doubt  at  length, 
Truth  may  stand  forth  unmoved  of  change, 
An  image  with  profulgent  brows, 
And  perfect  limbs,  as  from  the  storm 
Of  running  fires  and  fluid  range 
Of  lawless  airs,  at  last  stood  out 
This  excellence  and  solid  form 
Of  constant  beauty." 

Agnosticism,  as  distinguished  from  scepticism,  is  either  a 
truthful  confession  of  a  temporary  and  curable  condition  of 
the  individual  mind,  or  else  it  is  a  positive  and  universal 
proposition  which  itself  aspires  to  the  position  of  a  well- 
grounded  and  comprehensive  cognitive  judgment.  In  the 
latter  case,  however,  it  cannot  possibly  deny  for  itself  the 


SCEPTICISM,   AGNOSTICISM,  AND  CRITICISM        393 

ontological  significance  which  every  universal  denial,  and, 
indeed,  every  negative  cognitive  judgment,  necessarily  pos- 
sesses. Here  the  principles  of  non-contradiction  and  of  suffi- 
cient reason,  of  the  transcendental  use  of  the  categories  in  all 
universal  propositions,  and  of  the  outological  implicates  that 
inhere  in  those  processes  which  terminate  in  the  cognitive 
judgment,  have  their  most  rigid  and  complete  application. 
All  such  principles  set  invincible  limits  to  agnosticism,  which 
are  of  positive  and  supreme  epistemological  value.  But,  on 
the  other  hand,  all  human  knowledge  is,  not  so  much  rigidly 
encompassed  and  limited  by  the  unknown  as  interconnected 
with  and  based  upon  presuppositions,  postulates,  and  unanalyz- 
able  data  of  fact,  concerning  the  origin  and  causal  explana- 
tion of  which  no  answer  whatever  can  be  given.  As  all 
science  explains  only  by  reference  to  the  unexplained  and  the 
inexplicable,  so  a  theory  of  knowledge  is  philosophically 
grounded  only  as  it  admits  that  much  of  its  critical  effort  ends 
in  nescience.  In  view  of  this  it  is  customary  and  appropriate 
to  say  that  the  process  of  explaining  by  giving  reasons,  and 
by  connecting  one  "  moment "  of  experience  with  another, 
cannot  go  on  forever.  But  what  we  have  been  trying  to  show 
is  something  more  fundamental  than  this.  The  human  mind 
does  not  refuse  the  effort  to  explain  because  it  gets  tired  at 
some  point  or  other  in  moving  along  the  line  of  that  effort ;  nor 
is  the  task  of  episternology  like  that  of  milking  a  he-goat  into 
a  sieve.  The  rather  is  our  conclusion  this :  The  positive  char- 
acter and  indubitable  ontological  validity  of  human  knowledge, 
but  also  its  limited  character  and  inevitable  failure  to  frame 
the  full  and  perfectly  clear  picture  of  the  extra-mentally  existent 
World,  must  both  be  recognized  and  combined  in  an  epistemo- 
logical doctrine  which  shall  claim  the  warrant  of  all  our  experi- 
ence. A  "trans-subjective  minimum"  is  always  found,  left 
over,  as  it  were,  from  the  most  corroding  tests  of  a  sceptical 
and  agnostic  criticism.  This  remnant, "  which  shall  be  saved  " 
from  the  fires  of  doubt  and  the  frosts  of  nescience,  has  always 


394        SCEPTICISM,   AGNOSTICISM,   AND   CRITICISM 

enough  of  life  in  it  to  generate  anew  a  system  of  confident 
cognitions  touching  the  nature  and  meaning  of  Reality  as 
given  to  men  to  know.  And  when  the  higher  life  of  conduct, 
of  art,  and  of  religion,  is  breathed  into  this  remnant,  it  soon 
takes  on  a  diviner  and  more  clearly  recognizable  shape.  But 
the  revelations  which  it  then  makes  of  its  own  nature  are  only 
for  eyes  that  have  been  touched  with  another  Spirit  than  that 
which  fitly  rules  over  the  course  of  a  critical  epistemology ; 
although  such  a  critical  epistemology,  if  it  reaches  a  point 
near  the  goal  of  the  fullest  and  worthiest  self-cognition,  pre- 
pares the  way  for  such  revelations.  Nor  is  there  any  so  very 
marked  break  in  the  course,  when  we  pass  from  knowledge  of 
Self  and  of  Things  to  so-called  faith  in  the  Supreme  and  Ulti- 
mate Reality. 

At  this  point,  it  is  not  only  interesting,  but  suggestive  of  a 
truth  which  merits  and  will  receive  further  examination,  to 
notice  again  that  scepticism  and  agnosticism  receive  most  of 
their  needful  correction  in  the  life  of  feeling  and  of  action. 
The  rights  of  philosophical  criticism  must  never  be  discredited 
or  denied ;  and  after  having  taken  so  much  pains  to  think  our 
way  through  the  clouds  of  doubt  and  nescience,  we  are  not 
going  to  fall  back  again  upon  the  refuge  of  mere  feeling,  or  of 
a  doing  that  is  irrational  and  does  not  strive,  as  far  as  possible, 
at  self-understanding.  But  knowledge  itself  has  been  seen  to 
be  something  more  than  mere  thinking.  The  rather  is  it  an 
attitude  of  the  entire  cognitive  soul  toward  the  reality  with 
which  the  soul  has  commerce  in  the  act  of  cognition.  If  those 
who  "  dabble  in  the  fount  of  fictive  tears  "  and  thus  "  divorce 
the  feeling  from  her  mate  the  deed,"  fail  of  the  highest  truth, 
so  also  do  those  who  forget  the  question  and  answer  of  Goethe, 
"  How  can  a  man  learn  to  know  himself  ?  By  reflection  never, 
only  by  action."  It  is  by  having  actual  transactions  with,  by 
handling,  as  it  were,  ourselves  and  other  things,  that  we 
know  that  we  and  they  are,  and  what  we  and  they  are.1  From 

1  Compare  Psychology,  Descriptive  and  Explanatory,  pp.  512  f. 


SCEPTICISM,  AGNOSTICISM,   AND   CRITICISM        395 

this  point  of  view  it  is  not  mere  juggling  with  words,  when  it 
is  claimed  that  the  practical  confidence  of  men  in  their  cogni- 
tions of  themselves,  of  other  men,  and  of  the  world  of  things, 
gives  the  lie  to  all  professions  of  a  sceptical  idealism  or  of 
a  complete  and  consistent  agnosticism. 

"  There  is  no  Unbelief! 
Whoever  says  to-morrow,  the  unknown, 
The  future,  trusts  that  power  alone 
Nor  dares  disown." 

Nor  is  such  faith  to  be  spoken  of  as  though  it  were  a  foreigner 
that  can  find  "  room "  in  the  mind  only  after  knowledge 
has  been  "  removed."  It  is  the  handmaid  of  knowledge. 
And  the  deed  which  it  motives,  and  the  reward  which  follows 
only  upon  the  deed,  are  the  fitting  expression  and  appointed 
adjunct  to  the  growing  life  of  cognition. 


CHAPTER  XIV 

ALLEGED    "ANTINOMIES" 

""*HERE  is  only  one  conceivable  way  in  which  the  most 
-*•  thoroughly  sceptical  examination  of  the  problem  of 
knowledge  could  end  in  complete  agnosticism  as  to  any 
trans-subjective  value  for  the  functioning  and  the  products  of 
our  cognitive  faculties.  To  follow  that  way  one  must  demon- 
strate beyond  doubt  the  existence  of  genuine  "  antinomies " 
in  the  very  heart  of  reason  itself.  Perhaps,  however,  the 
theoretical  outcome  of  the  employment  of  reason  as  compelled 
to  be  self-critical,  but  doomed  to  reach  so  unhappy  a  con- 
clusion, would  better  be  described  as  a  peculiar  kind  of  scep- 
ticism. Dogmatic  universal  agnosticism  it  could  not  well  be ; 
for,  as  has  been  shown  in  the  preceding  chapter,  such  agnos- 
ticism affirms  a  vast  amount  of  assured  cognitions,  although 
in  a  quasi-unconscious  and  self-contradictory  way. 

But  suppose  that  the  ultimate  result  of  our  critical  inquiries 
—  incited,  urged  on,  and  guided  by  a  restless  and  determined 
spirit  of  doubt  —  is  the  discovery  of  fundamental  and  irre- 
solvable contradictions,  both  of  an  epistemological  and  of  an 
ontological  reference.  Suppose,  on  the  one  hand,  that  we  find 
the  very  laws  of  our  own  cognitive  life  compelling  us  to  think 
or  believe  true  what  they  themselves,  when  considered  from 
other  and  equally  tenable  points  of  view,  show  cannot  possibly 
be  known  to  be  true,  or  what  must  even  be  held  to  be  false. 
Suppose,  on  the  other  hand,  that  the  Reality  which  appears  to 
be  given  to  us,  with  clearness  and  self-consistency,  by  certain 
forms  of  cognition,  shows  to  the  more  searching  analysis  of 


ALLEGED  "ANTINOMIES"  397 

philosophy  certain  inherent  and  irremovable  contradictions. 
For  example,  It  must  be  known  as  both  "  One  "  and  "  Many," 
—  in  meanings  of  these  two  words  which  are  carefully  adapted 
to  make  them  positively  inapplicable  to  the  same  subject.  Or, 
It  must  be  known  as  never  changing  or  in  any  way  subjected 
to  the  differentiations  which  the  phenomenal  reality  of  things 
displays ;  and  yet  also  known  as  ceaselessly  changing  and 
as  itself  the  subject  and  ground  of  all  change.  Or,  again,  It 
must  be  known  as  Absolute  in  the  sense  of  being  wholly 
unrelated  to  aught  else  and  quite  incapable  of  any  self-differ- 
entiation which  shall  bring  it  into  a  system  of  self-relations  ; 
and  yet  also  known  as  the  subject  and  ground  of  all  relations. 
Or,  once  more,  It  must  not  be  known  or  thought  of  as  personal, 
because  personality  is  essentially  limitation  ;  and  yet  every 
applicable  conception  which  we  can  possibly  form  in  our  most 
happy  moments  of  insight  and  aspiration,  as  a  matter  of  fact 
is,  and  as  sound  doctrine  of  epistemology  must  be,  taken 
from  our  experience  with  our  own  self-known  Selves. 

Now,  it  is  tolerably  plain  that  any  issue  to  the  process  of 
sceptical  inquiry  similar  to  the  several  conclusions  given 
above  might  possibly  force  this  alternative  upon  the  mind 
experiencing  it :  either  resolutely  to  maintain  the  sceptical  as 
distinguished  from  the  dogmatically  agnostic  attitude,  or  else 
to  get  over  into  the  attitude  of  affirmation  in  some  other  than 
the  critical  way.  It  is  a  fact  of  no  little  epistemological  sig- 
nificance in  the  history  of  philosophy  that  most  reflective 
thinkers  have  preferred  to  espouse  the  latter  member  of  this 
alternative.  Reasons  for  this  fact,  which  lie  deep  in  the  na- 
ture of  man,  are  not  wanting.  It  is  not  a  pleasant  or  satisfac- 
tory condition  for  the  human  mind  to  be  consciously  turning 
over  and  over  the  problem  of  knowledge, — like  a  squirrel 
pawing  a  revolving  cage,  and  looking  through  the  bars  upon 
tempting  fields  outlying,  but  with  the  conviction  that  cage, 
and  outlying  fields,  and  the  being  who  is  ceaselessly  turning 
and  looking  are  all  alike  parts  of  one  phantasmagoria.  Both 


398  ALLEGED  "ANTINOMIES" 

the  heart  and  the  mind  of  man  revolt  at  this.  But  nothing 
else  is  strictly  logical  for  one  who  discovers  "  antinomies  "  in 
his  own  cognitive  faculty  —  in  the  most  appropriate  meaning 
of  that  much  abused  and  ambiguous  word.  Just  here,  there- 
fore, the  influence  of  practical  considerations  is  apt  to  become 
very  strong.  The  way  out  of  the  cage  seems,  in  some  sort, 
to  open  for  "  faith ; "  or  else  the  necessity,  if  not  the  ration- 
ality, is  discovered  of  acting  as  though  the  truth  were  on  one 
side  or  the  other  of  the  still  unyielding  antinomy.  This  prac- 
tical solution  of  the  alleged  antinomies  of  reason  is  apt  to  be 
accomplished  either  with  considerable  show  of  violence  and 
some  scornful  reference  to  the  futility  of  metaphysics  as  an 
ontological  affair ;  or  else  it  puts  forth  the  sweet  assumption 
of  superiority  to  all  considerations  of  a  merely  reflective 
kind,  and  poses  as  an  attainment  of  great  ethical  and 
religious  value. 

It  scarcely  need  be  pointed  out  to  any  one  who  has  thought- 
fully followed  the  course  of  our  critical  investigations  up  to 
this  point  that  we  cannot  accept  such  an  alternative  without 
abandoning  all  the  best  results  attained  by  these  investiga- 
tions. To  speak  truth,  we  have  scant  respect  for  the  alterna- 
tive. We  do  not  find  ourselves  forced  to  take  it,  or  to  adopt 
any  other  form  of  a  similar  alternative.  For  we  believe  that 
all  such  "  antinomies  "  —  that  is,  all  alleged  contradictions  in 
the  fundamental  laws  of  cognition,  or  as  between  those  "  cate- 
gories "  whose  ontological  application  is  necessary  to  the  con- 
struction of  a  conception  of  the  really  existent  World  —  are 
fictions  of  the  critic's  imagination.  In  other  words,  they  are 
only  spurious  antinomies.  This  negative  conclusion,  with  its 
justifiable  scorn,  in  answer  to  the  agnostic  scorn  for  meta- 
physics, or  to  the  weakly  sidling  out  of  the  difficult  path 
of  criticism  into  the  refuge  of  a  merely  emotional  and  practi- 
cal faith,  is  defensible  on  grounds  of  history.  As  to  the 
"  family  of  faith,"  we,  too,  claim  an  inalienable  right  to  be 
counted  among  its  members.  As  to  "  confidence  in  reason," 


ALLEGED  "ANTINOMIES"  399 

it  is  a  reasonable  and  prudent  confidence  of  this  sort  which 
has  been  confirmed  and  expounded  by  following  the  course  of 
a  presuppositionless  criticism.  As  to  a  proposal  to  "  divorce  " 
the  two,  we  will  hear  nothing  of  it.  No  irreconcilable  quarrel 
has  yet  been  discovered  between  faith  and  reason,  but  rather, 
their  indissoluble  union  in  the  very  nature  of  the  cognitive 
process  itself.  And  the  history  of  human  reflective  thinking 
shows  that  the  mind  of  man,  both  in  the  actual  development 
of  knowledge  and  in  its  maturer  judgment  respecting  the  the- 
oretical outcome  of  a  criticism  of  knowledge,  does  not  rest  in 
this  alternative. 

The  full  historical  disproof  of  the  existence  of  real  antino- 
mies in  the  cognitive  functions  of  the  human  mind,  or  in  its 
reasoned  conception  of  the  really  Existent,  cannot,  of  course, 
be  undertaken  in  this  treatise.  We  shall,  however,  make  a 
somewhat  careful  testing  of  several  alleged  examples  as  pro- 
posed by  two  writers  on  this  subject.  Of  all  critics  who  have 
discovered  antinomies  in  human  reason  as  the  result  of  a 
critical  examination  of  its  nature,  Kant  is  undoubtedly  at  once 
the  most  thorough,  subtle,  and  seductive,  if  not  convincing. 
It  would  be  difficult  to  put  the  doctrine  of  antinomies  into  a 
more  defensible  form,  whether  as  regarded  from  the  theoreti- 
cal or  from  the  practical  point  of  view,  than  that  given  to  it 
in  the  "Transcendental  Dialectic"  (the  "logic  of  illusion," 
Die  Logik  des  Scheins).  The  recent  work  of  Mr.  Bradley  on 
"  Appearance  and  Reality "  propounds  a  similar  doctrine  in 
even  a  more  unmistakable,  but  cruder  and  less  elaborate  form. 
One  or  two  of  the  special  examples  brought  forward  by  these 
two  advocates  of  irreconcilable  contradictions  in  the  faculty 
of  cognition  as  applied  to  extra-mental  Reality  will  suffice  for 
illustration  and  enforcement  of  our  negative  position  toward 
all  antinomies. 

The  examples  both  of  Kant  and  of  Mr.  Bradley  are  not  anti- 
nomies at  all ;  they  are,  rather,  spurious  contradictions  which 
can  always  be  got  up  when  abstract  conceptions  of  more  or  less 


400  ALLEGED  "ANTINOMIES" 

doubtful  empirical  origin  and  of  perverted  or  mutilated  con- 
struction are  hypostasized  and  brought  into  relations  that  are 
themselves  either  fictitious  or  abstracted  inconsiderately  from 
the  relations  of  real  individual  things.  Of  other  examples  that 
might  be  culled  from  history,  —  for  they  grow  thick  enough 
along  either  side  of  the  path  of  epistemological  criticism, — 
there  would  seem  to  be  no  need.  Conclusions  like  those  found 
in  the  unhappy  and  largely  absurd  attempt  of  Dean  Mansel  to 
recommend  faith  in  God  by  involving  the  conception  of  Him 
as  Absolute  in  hopeless  contradictions  may  well  enough  be 
left  to  feel  the  force  of  the  treatment  accorded  to  this  particu- 
lar example  by  John  Stuart  Mill ;  for,  although  this  quondam 
positivist  left  a  posthumous  declaration  of  his  personal  faith 
in  God,  he  freely  and  indignantly  consigned  himself  to  eternal 
perdition  rather  than  believe  in  such  a  Divine  Being  as  the 
juggling  of  ecclesiastical  agnosticism  had  commended  to  him. 

But  before  illustrating  our  unequivocal  denial  of  all  alleged 
antinomies,  it  is  necessary  to  review  briefly  the  affirmative 
position  to  which  the  critical  process  has  led  us.  It  has  been 
made  clear  that  while,  from  the  psychological  point  of  view, 
every  cognition  is  a  process  in  consciousness,  and  subjective 
both  as  to  content  and  function-wise,  no  cognition  is  merely 
subjective ;  on  the  contrary,  the  very  nature  of  cognition,  epis- 
temologically  considered,  is  ^raws-subjective  and  ontological 
in  its  reference  and  its  implicates.  Speaking  with  a  broader 
and  more  inclusive  view  before  us,  experience  is  indeed  always 
capable  of  being  represented  as,  for  every  individual  mind,  its 
very  own  and  no  other.  And  yet,  in  every  cognitive  experi- 
ence, it  —  that  is,  the  experience  considered  as  a  single  "mo- 
ment "  in  the  flux  of  consciousness  —  is  itself  transcended. 
No  cognition  is  of  itself  as  a  mere  momentary  state  ;  it  is  of 
some  existence  which  must  be  regarded  as  not  dependent  for 
its  being  upon  that  state.  The  possibility  of  transcending 
experience  by  knowledge  can  be  denied  only  if  we  refuse  to 
enlarge  the  meaning  of  experience  itself  so  as  to  include  both 


ALLEGED  "ANTINOMIES"  401 

the  implicates  which  criticism  of  the  processes  of  knowledge 
discovers,  and  as  well  the  legitimate  conclusions,  as  to  the 
nature  of  the  Self  and  of  Things,  which  result  from  the  think- 
ing that  enters  into  all  cognitive  experience.  So  that  when 
scepticism  seems  about  to  bring  us  to  the  position  of  complete 
agnosticism,  or  of  the  positivism  which  denies  the  possibility 
of  transcending  experience,  it  always  destroys  itself  in  the 
depths  of  absurdity  to  which  it  has  sunk. 

In  connection  with  this  critical  result,  the  transcendental 
use  of  the  so-called  "  categories  "  is  vindicated.  Among  these 
categories  Relation  and  Change  are,  in  some  sort,  supreme. 
We  know  that  relations  really  are,  and  that  changes  actually 
take  place.  Indeed,  this  proposition  is  not  itself  debatable 
and  matter  of  argument ;  but  to  dispute  it  is  to  enter  upon  an 
absurd  attempt,  by  an  affirmation  of  nescience,  to  overcome, 
in  making  the  affirmation,  the  constitutional  forms  of  cog- 
nition itself.  What  it  is  "  really  to  be  related,"  and  what  it 
is  "  actually  to  change,"  is  given  in  the  indubitable  experience 
with  the  Self,  as  really  changing  its  own  states  in  dependence 
upon  immediately  cognized  or  reasonably  inferred  relations  to 
things.  But  if  to  dispute  the  trans-subjective  reference  and 
validity  of  these  categories  is  absurd,  to  explain  them  in  terms 
that  are  simpler  and  more  intelligible  is  impossible.  All  expla- 
nation, in  other  words,  assumes  and  makes  use  of  the  same 
categories ;  and  all  explanation  makes  use  of  them  with  the 
assumption  that  they  are  valid  in  reality.  Now,  this  concrete 
reality,  really  related  and  actually  changing,  is  the  reality 
which  we  immediately  and  indubitably  know.  Reality  —  in 
general,  and  spelled  with  a  capital  R  —  may  be  a  mere  ab- 
straction ;  and  to  oppose  it  to  the  known  reality,  after  the 
latter  has  been  degraded  by  calling  it  "Appearance,"  may  be 
equivalent  to  an  act  of  highway  robbery.  Such  an  act  is  no 
less  indefensible  because  the  proceeds  are  subsequently  handed 
over  to  some  ethical  or  religious  Reformatory.  But  if  the 
question  be  pressed,  What  further  is  this  Reality,  thus  known 

26 


402  ALLEGED  "ANTINOMIES" 

as  really  related  and  actually  changing  ?  we  can  only  answer : 
"  It  is  the  Self  and  that  which  the  Self  knows,  both  negatively 
as  not-self  and  positively  in  so  far  as  it  appears  analogous  to 
the  Self,  —  in  an  indefinite  variety  of  relations  and  an  endless 
series  of  changes." 

The  detailed  reconciliation  of  this  transcendental  use  of  the 
categories  of  relation  and  change  with  the  conception  of  some- 
thing permanent  and  unchanging,  belongs  to  a  critical  meta- 
physics. But  the  detailed  examination  already  given  to  the 
principles  of  identity  and  of  sufficient  reason,  not  only  in  their 
logical  and  subjective  aspects  but  also  in  their  ontological  and 
trans-subjective  references,  forbids  that  conceptions  of  Sub- 
stance, Law,  Identity,  Unity,  Causal  Nexus,  etc.,  should  be  so 
constructed  as  to  create  antinomies  between  them  and  the  con- 
crete facts  of  the  life  of  cognition  ;  that  is,  valid  conceptions 
of  substance,  law,  identity,  unity,  causal  nexus,  etc.,  must  be 
framed  upon  the  same  basis  of  cognition  as  that  in  which  are 
employed,  so  to  speak,  the  categories  of  relation  and  of  change. 
Speaking  in  a  more  general  way,  contradictions  cannot  be  the- 
oretically introduced  that  do  not  actually  find  themselves 
resolved  in  our  cognitive  experience  with  ourselves  and  with 
things.  This  known  world  is  known ;  it  is  known  really  to 
be.  Antinomies  between  it  and  the  world  of  abstract  think- 
ing—  whether  conceived  of  as  oppositions  and  contradictions 
between  "phenomenal  reality"  and  "noumena"  (Ding-an- 
sich),  or  between  "Appearance"  and  "Reality"  —  are  not 
genuine  antinomies.  And  if  agnosticism  is  to  return  upon 
us  in  the  shape  of  rational  antinomies,  then,  as  was  said  of 
the  unfortunate  into  whom  an  increase  of  demons  entered, 
"  the  last  state  of  that  man  is  worse  than  the  first." 

This  brief  resume,  however,  is  quite  sufficient  to  remind  us 
how  the  appearance  of  irreconcilable  contradictions  may 
emerge  to  a  criticism  that  is  one-sided,  and  that  fails  to 
grasp  the  essence  and  the  significance  of  knowledge  in  its  to- 
tality. For  here,  it  may  be  said,  is  the  very  hearth  and  source 


ALLEGED  "ANTINOMIES"  403 

of  antinomies  :  Knowledge  is  subjective  and  yet  trans-sub- 
jective ;  it  is  mtfra-mental  phenomenon,  and  yet  it  implicates 
ezfavz-mental  reality.  The  categories,  or  modes  of  the  function- 
ing of  mind  in  all  knowledge,  are  capable  of  being  regarded  as 
purely  formal ;  they  afford  themes  for  psychology  and  logic 
to  discuss,  just  as  though  no  question  of  a  real  world  were 
anyhow  implied  in  the  discussion.  Yet  some  at  least  of  these 
so-called  categories  are  the  very  essential  and  inescapable 
forms  of  all  the  reality  about  which  aught  can  be  known  or 
even  conceived. 

We  may  not  indeed  affirm  off-hand  that  the  Reality  is  just 
as  we  find  ourselves  compelled  by  the  laws  of  our  understanding 
to  think  it ;  but  what  that  is  unthinkable  and  inconceivable 
can  lay  any  claim,  at  the  door  of  either  our  understandings 
or  our  hearts,  to  a  place  in  our  world  of  real  beings  and  of 
actual  transactions  ?  Now,  if  the  terms  for  such  oppositions 
as  these  are  correctly  understood,  they  suggest  different 
modes  of  regarding  our  one  cognitive  experience,  instead  of 
irreconcilable  oppositions  in  the  very  nature  of  that  experience. 
The  antinomies  which  they  suggest  are  solved  practically,  up 
to  the  limit  which  marks  off  the  agnostic  attitude  toward 
the  foundations  of  all  experience,  by  every  special  act  of  cog- 
nitive experience.  To  know  anything  is  to  solve  these  antino- 
mies. For  every  act  of  knowledge  may  —  nay,  must  —  be 
regarded  as  both  subjective  and  trans-subjective,  infra-mental 
phenomenon,  and  eatfra-mentally  referent.  Each  cognition  is 
an  individual,  concrete  experience  which  transcends  itself, 
regarded  as  individual  and  concrete.  It  gives  to  conscious- 
ness some  portion  of  the  world  as  its  idea ;  and  also  as  other 
and  more  than  its  idea,  —  as  Reality  in  action  over  against 
the  ideating  Self. 

Now,  if  certain  abstract  statements  or  laws  seem  to  follow 
from  the  facts  of  cognitive  experience,  which  appear  to  be 
contradictory  or  "  antinomic  "  in  the  deeper  meaning  of  that 
latter  word,  we  shall  do  well  to  remember :  "  Actuality  has 


404  ALLEGED  "ANTINOMIES" 

ways  and  means  to  make  that  possible  which  looks  to  us  as 
though  it  were  afflicted  with  irreconcilable  contradictions." 
This  practical  solution  of  seeming  contradictories  is  actually 
accomplished  by  the  human  mind  for  itself  every  time  it  pos- 
its, in  a  feeling-full  and  voluntary  way,  a  cognitive  judgment. 
Body  and  soul,  the  Self  (as  it  were,  intellect,  feeling,  and  will), 
takes  possession  of  the  extra-mentally  real,  and  makes  it  its 
own.  Hence  the  agnosticism  of  the  idealist  or  positivist  who 
denies  the  actuality  of  this  reconciling  experience  must  be 
satisfied  to  place  its  own  alleged  antinomies  upon  a  basis 
of  logical  abstractions  which,  in  their  turn,  have  no  other 
ground  than  these  very  acts  of  cognition  that  afford  the  prac- 
tical solution  of  alt  such  antinomies. 

Ordinarily,  however,  the  antinomies  proposed  by  the  scep- 
tical critic  are  not  the  products  of  so  deeply  seated  a  disease. 
They  are  not  even  to  be  considered  as  "  antinomies  "  at  all  in 
the  sense  in  which  their  discoverer  would  have  us  believe  he 
uses  this  word.  This  observation  fitly  leads  to  a  brief  dis- 
cussion of  the  several  possible  kinds  of  contradiction  which 
may  be  found  lurking  in  the  alleged  cognitions  of  men.  That 
facts  of  cognitive  experience,  quoad  facts,  can  contradict  each 
other,  no  one  would  think  of  claiming  seriously.  Statements 
of  alleged  facts  may  well  enough  be  found  in  irreconcilable 
opposition  to  each  other.  But  this  is  the  opposition  of  truth 
o^E  fact  to  error  in  matter-of-fact,  or  of  one  error  in  matter-of- 
fact  to  another,  rather  than  an  antinomy  properly  so-called. 
Science  encounters  innumerable  such  contradictions,  as  does 
also  our  ordinary  practical  knowledge  ;  and  the  smooth  prog- 
ress of  knowledge  is  much  embarrassed,  while  its  solid  and 
matured  growth  is  fostered,  by  them.  Conceptions,  too,  when 
framed  by  different  minds  upon  the  basis  of  fundamentally 
similar  and  yet,  after  all,  exceedingly  various  facts  of  experi- 
ence, may  contain  opposed  or  contradictory  elements.  So 
that  not  only  may  men,  without  conscious  lying  or  error, 
affirm,  the  one,  "  It  was  so,"  or,  "  So  he  did,"  and  the  other, 


ALLEGED  "ANTINOMIES"  405 

"  It  was  not  so,"  or,  "  So  he  did  not"  but  they  may  also 
express  their  most  deliberate  judgments  as  to  the  consti- 
tution and  behavior  of  familiar  things  in  quite  squarely 
contradictory  terms.  Nor  does  the  recent  rapid  progress 
of  the  physical  and  psychological  sciences  seem  to  diminish, 
but  rather  to  multiply  and  to  intensify  these  opposed  concep- 
tions. The  highest  and  most  comprehensive  conceptions, 
the  most  general  and  demonstratively  assured  laws,  of  these 
sciences  are  all  capable  of  being  filled  with  apparent  contra- 
dictions, if  only  the  limits  of  their  accuracy  in  application 
and  the  tentative  and  fluid  nature  of  their  constitution  be 
disregarded.  Indeed,  if  one  choose  to  look  at  the  matter 
thus,  —  and  this  is  a  permissible  and  even  fruitful  manner 
of  regarding  it,  —  all  growth  of  knowledge  depends  upon  the 
principle  of  contradiction  being  active  in  a  very  comprehen- 
sive and  lively  way.  I  do  not  conceive  of  anything  now  in 
such  manner  as  to  escape  all  contradiction  of  my  conceptions 
of  twenty  or  thirty  years  ago.  "  When  I  was  a  child,  I  spake 
as  a  child,  I  understood  as  a  child,  I  thought  as  a  child  ;  but 
when  I  became  a  man,  I  put  away  childish  things."  Of  every 
individual  and  of  the  race  it  must  now  and  always,  we  doubt 
not,  be  said  :  "  For  we  know  in  part,  and  we  prophesy  in 
part."  Not  once  for  all,  but  always  and  continuously,  is  the 
hope  of  the  individual  and  of  the  race  :  "  When  that  which  is 
perfect  is  come,  then  that  which  is  in  part  shall  be  "  —  con- 
tradicted partially,  and  largely  transcended,  and  so  —  "done 
away." 

In  some  sort,  all  specific  orderly  arrangements  of  the 
results  of  the  observation  of  facts  are  liable,  and  even  cer- 
tain, to  be  contradicted  by  similar  arrangements  of  other 
facts,  or  even  of  the  same  facts  looked  upon  from  other  points 
of  view.  No  law  (or  nemos')  gets  realization  in  the  world 
of  experience  without  limitation,  opposition,  and  contradic- 
tion from  other  laws  (or  nomoi).  Laws,  when  set  into  actual 
operation  by  the  behavior  of  real  beings,  inevitably  reveal 


406  ALLEGED  "ANTINOMIES" 

their  inherent  oppositions  (are  anti-nomoi).  For  real  beings 
do  not  actually  divide  their  qualities  according  to  the  terms 
in  which  we  describe  them  ;  nor  are  their  transactions  actually 
separable  according  to  the  forces  and  laws  which  we  speak 
of  as  "  seated  in  "  or  "  ruling  over  "  them.  Why,  for  example, 
does  not  the  projecting  part  of  the  coping  stone  fall,  in  obedi- 
ence to  the  law  of  gravitation,  from  the  top  of  yonder  building  ? 
Because,  as  physics  declares,  the  forces  of  cohesion,  acting 
under  quite  different  laws,  thwart  and  oppose,  for  the  time 
being,  the  law  of  gravitation.  In  the  reality  itself,  the  law 
of  gravitation  and  the  laws  of  cohesion  exist  as  antinomies 
(nomoi  that  are  anti-nomoi).  But  now,  after  a  frosty  night, 
the  coping  stone  actually  breaks  off  and  tumbles  to  the 
ground;  for  that  unique  law  which  makes  water  expand 
forcibly  at  32°  Fahr.  has  contradicted  the  laws  of  cohesion 
and  has  restored  to  the  law  of  gravitation  its  temporarily 
suspended  rights  over  this  mass  of  matter. 

As  science  rises  in  its  observations  and  generalizations  from 
the  relatively  simple  and  more  massive  forms  of  the  being 
and  behavior  of  real  things  to  the  more  complex  and  molecular 
or  atomic,  it  is  obliged  to  posit  a  great  variety  of  new  forces 
which  act  against  the  unrestricted  reign  of  those  laws  that 
suffice  to  express  what  belongs  to  the  simpler  and  more 
massive  forms.  The  picture  which  the  chemico-physical  view 
of  the  world  presents  to  us  is  an  indefinite  exemplification  of 
the  antinomic  action  of  various  forces  so-called.  Indeed,  the 
specific  qualifications  of  those  elementary  physical  beings,  the 
atoms  out  of  which  chemical  science  gets  the  orderly  con- 
struction of  actuality,  consist  —  to  the  extent  of  fully  one  half 
their  entire  content  —  in  just  this :  they  can,  in  accordance 
with  laws  of  their  own,  contradict  each  other  in  their  common 
strife  after  fitting  partners  with  which  to  make  a  temporary 
combination.  But  molecules  and  atoms  are  all  constantly 
united  in  contradicting  the  more  primary  laws  of  physics. 
Chemical  laws  and  physical  laws,  in  actuality,  are  antinomies. 


ALLEGED  "ANTINOMIES"  407 

The  pitiful  failure  of  the  modern  effort  to  make  out  of  biology 
a  purely  chemico-physical  science  affor.ds  numberless  other 
illustrations  of  the  same  truth.  And  the  effort  to  establish 
a  theory  of  mental  life  in  terms  of  the  combination  and 
differentiation  of  sensations  and  ideas  is,  even  now,  giving 
tokens  of  a  yet  more  pitiful  failure.  Whenever  I  do  anything 
with  a  conscious  motive  in  view,  I  put  myself  in  opposition 
to  the  uninterrupted  action  of  the  merely  chemico-physical 
and  the  psycho-physical  mechanism. 

He,  however,  who  denies  the  possibility  of  knowledge,  or 
the  possibility  of  the  existence  of  a  unitary  system  of  things, 
because  human  knowledge  of  things  is  an  unceasing  recogni- 
tion of  the  immanence  of  many  conflicting  forces  acting  under 
laws  of  opposition  and  resistance  (laws,  that  is,  which  when 
brought  face  to  face  seem  to  be  antinomies),  reasons  falsely 
and  goes  quite  wide  of  the  true  state  of  the  case.  For  it  is 
just  in  the  recognition  of  the  facts  of  opposition  and  of  the 
modes  of  the  actual  behavior  of  things  under  conflicting  laws 
that  quite  one  half  of  all  our  knowledge  consists.  Moreover, 
it  is  only  while  maintaining  their  own  specific  being,  and 
refusing  to  be  identified  throughout  with  one  another,  that 
these  many  Things  make  up  the  Unity  of  the  World. 

If  now  any  one  is  offended  because  this  fair  and  orderly 
cosmos  has  just  been  accused  of  being  full  of  antinomies,  he 
may  perhaps  be  appeased  by  thinking  out  more  clearly  what 
is  meant  by  "  laws,"  and  in  what  sense  laws  can  be  "  opposed  " 
to  one  another ;  in  what  sense,  that  is, "  antinomies  "  can  exist 
for  critical  discovery  and  recognition.  At  present  it  is  suffi- 
cient merely  to  note  that  the  word  "  law "  simply  means  a 
more  or  less  uniform  mode  of  the  behavior  of  things,  as  looked 
at  from  one  chosen  point  of  view.  But,  in  reality,  no  thing  is 
so  mean  or  so  restricted  in  its  equipment  of  capacity  for  doing 
and  for  suffering  that  it  can  ever  be  satisfactorily  considered 
from  one  point  of  view  simply.  Every  Thing  —  according  to 
the  very  terms  of  the  hypothesis  —  is  one  thing ;  and  what 


408  ALLEGED   "ANTINOMIES" 

it  is  now  doing  is  one  specific  transaction  under  definite  terms 
of  relation  to  many  .different  things.  But  the  real  being  of 
each  thing  is  infinitely  complex  ;  and  its  actual  doing  may  be 
considered  under  an  indefinite  number  of  relations,  from  an 
indefinite  number  of  points  of  view.  What  falls  into  con- 
tradiction is  our  abstractions ;  and  this  they  always  do  if  we 
inconsiderately  plump  them  down  as  though  they  were  the 
sole  measures  of  the  real,  even  as  it  is  known  to  us.  The 
fact  that  antinomies  thus  emerge  does  not  discredit  human 
knowledge ;  the  rather  is  it  proof  of  the  richness  and  variety 
of  human  knowledge.  Nor  does  it  show  that  there  can  be  no 
reality  answering  in  any  way  to  our  system  of  cognitions; 
the  rather  does  it  show  the  infinite  richness  and  variety  of 
content  belonging  to  Reality,  as  not  simply  answering  to,  but 
far  surpassing  the  terms  under  which  it  is  known  by  man. 
The  further  exposition  of  this  subject,  too,  must  be  left  to 
the  details  of  a  critical  metaphysics. 

When,  however,  the  question  is  raised  whether  antinomies 
exist  in  all  knowledge,  and  so  in  all  reality  as  known  to  us,  the 
answer  must  assume  a  different  form.  Yet  the  form  appro- 
priate to  this  answer  has  already  been  suggested.  When- 
ever antinomies  of  this  sort  and  extent  in  their  applicability 
are  propounded  as  a  result  of  the  criticism  of  cognitive 
faculty,  the  exercise  of  this  faculty  by  the  critic  himself  must 
be  subjected  to  a  careful  revisionary  criticism.  For  it  may 
turn  out  that  the  alarming  noise  is  merely  the  result  of  the 
petrified  abstractions  of  the  critic  which  are  meeting  in  mid- 
air and  exploding  each  other  ;  and  this  surely  may  take  place 
without  great  actual  damage  either  to  human  knowledge  or  to 
the  world  of  the  extra-mentally  existent  which  is  given  in  this 
knowledge.  One  may  then  return  more  calmly  to  the  belief 
that  truth  is  to  be  had  by  right  exercise  of  human  cog- 
nitive faculty.  One  may  even  get  increase  of  conviction  that 
no  truth  has  anything  to  fear  from  other  truths ;  while  illusion 
and  error  —  no  less  in  the  higher  regions  of  philosophical 


ALLEGED  "ANTINOMIES"  409 

criticism  than  in  the  denser  air  of  ordinary  sense-perceptions 
—  have  every  truth  to  fear.  Then,  too,  Truth  may  come  to 
mean  again  what  it  always  has  meant  to  minds  undisturbed 
by  epistemological  scepticism  or  agnosticism,  —  namely,  men- 
tal representation  which  affords  a  valid  cognition  of  the  being 
and  transactions  of  Reality.  Such  revisionary  criticism  of 
the  antinomic  conclusions  of  a  previous  sceptical  criticism 
we  shall  now  briefly  attempt  —  as  was  promised  above  —  in 
the  two  following  cases. 

The  claim  made  by  Kant  that  the  purpose  of  his  critical 
examination  of  man's  cognitive  faculty  was  the  removal  of 
knowledge  (rather  the  illusory  pretence  of  knowledge)  in 
order  to  "  make  room  "  for  faith  (in  God,  Freedom,  and  Im- 
mortality) has  not,  of  late,  been  sufficiently  credited.  The 
sincerity  of  this  claim  is,  however,  beyond  reasonable  ques- 
tion. It  is  proved  by  his  own  declaration,  by  the  many  indi- 
cations in  the  "  Critique  of  Pure  Reason  "  which  look  forward 
to  the  "  Critique  of  Practical  Reason,"  and  in  the  latter  work, 
which  look  backward  upon  the  earlier  work,  and  also  by  the 
very  bulk  and  chosen  method  of  the  "  Transcendental  Dialec- 
tic." The  "Transcendental  Logic"  is,  indeed,  that  part  of  the 
"  Critique  of  Pure  Reason  "  which  has  excited  interest  and 
promoted  hermeneulical  discussion,  far  out  of  proportion  to  its 
size.  But  the  relatively  condensed  form  in  which  Kant  left 
it,  and  the  changes  which  he  made  in  the  second  edition  for 
the  avowed  purpose  of  increased  clearness  and  of  defending 
its  doctrine  against  the  charge  of  sceptical  idealism,  indicate 
that  Kant  himself  regarded  this  part  of  his  "  Transcendental 
Logic "  as  only  subsidiary  to  his  main  critical  intent.  This 
intent  was  chiefly,  then,  to  establish  beyond  controversy  the 
doctrine  "  of  a  logic  of  illusion  "  (eine  Logik  des  Scheins).  It 
is  in  this  doctrine  that  the  resolve  of  its  author  to  "  make 
room  "  for  faith  comes  to  a  culmination  with  the  sceptical 
conclusion :  All  cognition  of  noumena  is,  by  the  very  consti- 
tution of  the  mind,  forever  rendered  impossible.  Here  the 


410  ALLEGED  "ANTINOMIES" 

critical  examination  of  those  processes  by  which  the  mind 
thinks  to  gain  a  knowledge  of  Reality  shows  that  these  pro- 
cesses are,  in  their  essential  nature,  deceptive.  The  "  dialectic 
of  pure  reason  "  is  declared  to  be  "  natural  and  inevitable  ;  " 
its  illusion  is  "  inherent  in,  and  inseparable  from,  human 
reason ;  "  and  "  even  after  the  illusion  has  been  exposed,"  it 
will  "  never  cease  to  fascinate  our  reason."  But  such  dialectic 
is  an  illusion,  utterly  and  forever  incapable  of  telling  us  any 
truth  about  the  real  Self,  or  the  actual  World  of  things. 
The  reality  we  know  is  but  an  appearance  of  reality  (phe- 
nomenal reality)  ;  the  actual  reality  —  if  so  uncouth  a  phrase 
may  be  pardoned  —  is  unknown  and  unknowable,  whether 
our  minds  strive  toward  a  satisfactory  knowledge  of  Self  or 
of  Things. 

It  is  not  our  purpose  here  to  discuss  thoroughly  the  general 
positions  of  the  "  Transcendental  Dialectic."  Indeed,  the 
most  important  of  them  have  already  been  considered,  either 
with  or  without  direct  reference  to  Kant.  But  whatever  view 
may  be  held  as  to  the  other  significant  aspects  of  the  episte- 
mological  problem,  the  success  of  the  critical  effort  to  estab- 
lish antinomies,  in  the  Kantian  sense,  would  have  the  effect 
which  their  original  proposer  intended  that  it  should  have  ;  it 
would  destroy  forever  the  possibility  of  knowledge  in  the 
sense  which  we  have  found  ourselves  compelled  to  give  to 
that  term.  According  to  Kant  the  reason  of  all  men  is 
afflicted  with  a  constitutional  and  incurable  tendency  to  start 
from  something  which  is  known,  and  by  false  syllogistic  pro- 
cesses conclude  "  to  something  else  of  which  no  conception  ever 
can  be  had,  but  to  which,  under  constraint  from  an  inevitable 
illusion,  there  is,  nevertheless,  attributed  objective  validity." 
Thus  do  all  cheat  themselves  who  suppose  that  they  know  the 
truth  about  the  real  nature  of  their  own  souls,  of  the  world 
of  things,  and  of  "  a  Being  of  all  beings,"  whom  faith  calls 
God.  All  these  phrases  stand  not  for  concepts  based,  in  a 
valid  way,  upon  a  real  cognitive  experience ;  "  they  are 


ALLEGED  "ANTINOMIES"  411 

sophistications,  not  of  (individual)  men,  but  of  pure  reason 
itself,  from  which  even  the  wisest  of  men  cannot  escape." 
Kant's  main  object  is  to  show  that  they  are  indeed  sophistica- 
tions ;  and  that  the  syllogisms  by  which  these  conceptions 
are  reached,  form  a  species  of  juggling  rather  than  a  trust- 
worthy activity  of  reason  (eher  vernunftelnde  als  Vernunft- 
sclilusse  zu  nennen).  Both  reasoning  and  conceptions,  as  estab- 
lished by  the  reasoning,  are  involved  in  hopeless  internal 
contradictions. 

For  our  present  purpose  it  is  not  necessary  to  distinguish 
between  the  epistemological  and  logical  standing  of  the 
"  paralogisms  "  and  that  of  the  "  antinomies  "  of  pure  reason. 
Both  are  given  as  instances  under  the  agnostic  conclusion  of 
Kant's  sceptical  examination  of  human  cognitive  faculty. 
The  knowledge  which  the  soul  has  of  its  own  real  being,  or 
rather  fancies  itself  to  have,  is  reduced  to  an  "inevitable 
illusion  "  of  reason  "  which  drives  us  to  a  formally  false  con- 
clusion ; "  because  we  are  continually  substituting  a  concep- 
tion of  the  soul  derived  from  the  mere  form  of  thinking, 
under  which  it  appears  to  itself,  for  its  nature  as  really  exist- 
ent. Thus  the  application  to  the  soul  of  the  categories  of 
substantiality,  unity,  and  relation  to  things,  is  a  work  of  illu- 
sion. But  the  contradictions  which  Kant  finds  inherent  in 
these  so-called  paralogisms  are  all  put  there  by  him ;  they  are 
the  products  of  his  own  tendency  to  substitute  formal  and 
seductive  abstractions  for  concrete  and  content-full  realities. 
Such  substantiality,  unity,  and  relationship  to  possible  objects 
in  space,  as  he  declares  that  reason  attributes  inevitably  to  the 
soul,  may  well  enough  for  the  most  part  be  denied.  But  the 
real  illusion,  on  the  part  of  both  Kant  and  of  the  theologians 
whom  he  controverts,  consisted  in  attributing  their  arguments 
to  a  necessity  of  reason.  It  is  not,  therefore,  a  criticism  of 
all  reason  which  is  needed,  with  a  view  to  detect  its  in- 
destructible, illusory  dialectic ;  it  is  only  a  criticism  of  cer- 
tain awkward  and  self-contradictory  conceptions,  as  applied 


412  ALLEGED   "ANTINOMIES" 

to  the  soul,  which  shall  result  in  substituting  for  these  concep- 
tions others  that  are  formed  upon  the  basis  of  our  actual 
cognitive  experience. 

The  alleged  contradictions  of  reason  to  which  Kant  him- 
self gave  the  name  of  "  antinomies  "  have  been  so  often  sub- 
jected to  criticism  and  their  fallacies  pointed  out,  that  it 
would  be  threshing  straw  already  many  times  under  the  flail 
to  criticise  them  in  detail  over  again.  Let  it  not  be  forgotten, 
however,  what  precisely  is  the  conclusion  which  Kant  wished 
to  prove  from  them.  Not  only  must  both  Thesis  and  Anti- 
thesis of  each  antinomy  appear  plausible  and  even  true,  but 
both  must  spring  up  ever  afresh  and  alike  inevitable  and  con- 
vincing, so  often  as  the  attempt  is  made  to  square  our  cogni- 
tions with  the  reality  of  Things.  For  what  the  proof  pledges 
itself  to  accomplish  is  precisely  this :  Thesis  is  irresistibly 
concluded  by  a  constitutionally  fixed  ratiocinative  process 
embedded  in  the  very  faculty  of  cognition ;  antithesis  is  con- 
cluded in  the  same  way  ;  thesis  and  antithesis  are  evenly- 
matched  contradictories  ;  therefore  —  reason  is  honeycombed 
with  antinomies,  and  knowledge  of  Reality  is  impossible. 
Now,  in  no  one  of  the  four  Kantian  antinomies  can  either  one 
of  these  pledges  be  made  good.  In  two  cases  both  thesis  and 
antithesis  are  only  probable  at  best,  but  with  varying  degrees 
of  probability ;  in  two  cases  the  thesis  and  the  antithesis  are 
not  fairly  opposed ;  in  no  case  can  both  be  said  to  be  proved 
as  inevitable  illusory  conclusions  of  reason ;  in  no  case,  there- 
fore, is  the  doctrine  of  antinomies  established  in  a  form  to 
justify  the  accusation  of  a  transcendental  illusion  inherent  in 
all  human  knowledge  of  the  world  of  real  things.  Indeed, 
the  admissions  of  Kant  himself  with  regard  to  the  third  and 
fourth  examples  virtually  abolish  their  character  as  contra- 
dictions of  a  rational  kind. 

In  the  case  of  the  first  antinomy,  if  by  "  World  "  (Die  Welt} 
be  meant  the  stellar  universe  as  at  present  known  to  us,  the 
thesis  is  much  more  probable  than  the  antithesis;  but  for 


ALLEGED   "ANTINOMIES"  413 

neither  is  there  any  a  priori  proof.  Properly  speaking,  pure 
reason  tells  us  nothing  upon  this  problem  sufficient  to  demon- 
strate (Beweits)  either  thesis  or  antithesis.  But  our  growing 
knowledge  of  the  system  of  things  seems  more  and  more 
clearly  to  indicate  that  "  the  World,"  as  known,  is  now  in  such 
condition  as  to  imply  that  its  extent  is  limited,  and  that  it  began 
to  be,  although  an  indefinitely  long  time  ago.  Against  this 
conclusion,  our  ignorance  of  how  the  world  began  to  be  is  no 
"  proof "  ;  neither  is  our  inability  to  conceive  of  past  time  in 
which  the  World  was  not  (eine  leere  Zeit)  a  ground  of  legiti- 
mate inference.  Indeed,  this  very  inability  is  something 
that  Kant  himself  seems  to  call  in  question,  when,  in  the 
"  Transcendental  ^Esthetic,"  he  declares  that  "  we  can  well 
take  away  phenomena  out  of  time."  Our  inability  to  repre- 
sent things  as  existent  out  of  space  and  time,  instead  of  being 
the  source  of  an  illusion,  is  the  result  of  the  fact  that  our 
positive  cognitions  of  things  are  in  space  and  time.  What  it 
is  really  to  be  in  space  and  time,  and  how  a  world  of  things 
can  be  conceived  of  as  beginning  to  be  in  space  and  time,  are 
questions  of  speculative  metaphysics,  the  answer  to  which 
must  be  made  to  depend  upon  concrete  and  valid  cognitions 
of  things,  if  answer  is  to  be  given  at  all.  Nor,  if  it  should 
be  found  that  agnosticism  is  the  only  attitude  toward  these 
questions,  does  it  follow  that  reason  is  full  of  antinomies, 
and  that  the  knowledge  of  things,  in  any  respect  as  they  really 
are,  is  impossible. 

The  second  example  of  the  "  antinomy  of  pure  reason  "  is 
so  far-fetched  and  inconclusive  that  it  seems  as  though  Kant 
must  have  invented  it  purely  in  the  interests  of  a  spurious 
architectonic  symmetry.  Its  obvious  fallacies  are  its  author's 
own  ;  they  cannot  be  fathered  upon  the  productive  energy  of 
"  reason  in  general."  The  conflict  is  one  which  results  from 
confusing  our  perceptions  and  corresponding  mental  represen- 
tations of  concrete  experiences  about  things  with  abstract 
and  purely  mathematical  concepts  of  the  formal  conditions  of 


414  ALLEGED  "ANTINOMIES" 

space  relations  —  abstractions  treated  as  though  they  were 
realities.  "  The  entire  antinomy,"  we  agree  with  Adickes  in 
saying,  "  has  originated  solely  out  of  a  confusion  of  concepts." 
Space,  abstractly  considered,  may  be  theoretically  treated  as 
though  it  were  indefinitely  divisible ;  indeed,  it  must  be  so 
treated.  When  space  is  treated  in  this  way,  our  sums  in 
the  pure  mathematics  of  space  "  prove  "  themselves  in  accord- 
ance with  the  principles  of  such  proof.  But  that  things  are 
not  infinitely  divisible  is  the  present  conclusion  of  those 
chemico-physical  sciences  which  are  based  upon  observation 
of  the  actual  modes  of  the  behavior  of  things. 

The  thesis  and  the  antithesis  of  the  third  example  of  an 
"  antinomy  of  pure  reason  "  are  so  full  of  faulty  conceptions 
and  inconsequent  argument  as  to  require  a  detailed  treatment 
of  the  doctrine  of  causation  in  order  properly  to  criticise 
them.  It  is  well  known  to  students  of  Kant  that  his  own 
conception  of  causation  was  ambiguous  and  changeable.  As 
a  mode  of  the  functioning  of  pure  understanding  the  concep- 
tion gets  (as  has  already  been  pointed  out)  a  wholly  unsat- 
isfactory treatment  in  the  table  of  the  categories.  But 
"  other "  causation  than  that  which  is  here  denominated 
"  according  to  the  laws  of  nature  "  is  assumed  as  the  source 
of  "  that  which  is  given  "  in  Kant's  own  account  of  the  origin 
and  nature  of  sensuous  experience ;  while  his  theory  of  the 
nature  and  grounds  of  the  life  of  conduct,  and  of  the  teleo- 
logical  interpretation  of  the  world,  finds  itself  obliged  freely 
to  postulate  such  other  causation. 

There  is  little  doubt,  however,  that  discussions  of  the  so- 
called  "  self-determining  power  "  of  the  Self  (eine  Kausalitdt 
durch  Freiheif)  are  particularly  fruitful  of  apparent  antino- 
mies. Here  theology  discovers  its  irreconcilable  contradic- 
tion between  the  divine  foreknowledge  and  predestination, 
on  the  one  hand,  and  the  imputability  and  spontaneity  of 
human  personality,  on  the  other  hand.  No  small  part  of  the 
most  persistent  difficulties  which  philosophy  finds  in  its  en- 


ALLEGED  "ANTINOMIES"  415 

deavor  so  to  construct  its  conception  of  the  "  Absolute,"  the 
"  Ultimate  Reality  "  (or  whatever  other  term  it  may  choose 
for  its  final  attempt  at  synthesis)  as  not  to  impair  the  legiti- 
mate grounds  of  ethics,  first  appears  in  connection  with  its 
analysis  of  the  causal  principle.  Indeed,  the  experience  of 
every  individual  man,  as  well  as  the  experience  of  the  race, 
involves  both  sides  of  this  so-called  antinomy.  The  tragedy  of 
life,  its  conflicts,  defeats,  and  victories,  is  fraught  with  the 
same  experience.  The  outcry  of  humanity  is  this :  "  I  find 
then  a  law,  that  when  I  would  do  good,  evil  is  present  with 
me ; "  and  —  "I  see  another  law  in  my  members,  warring 
against  the  law  of  my  mind."  This  is  the  great  antinomy, 
or  conflict  of  laws  (the  nomoi  that  run  anti),  under  which  the 
moral  development  of  the  individual  and  of  the  race  takes 
place.  And  according  as  the  Self,  aroused  and  enlightened, 
throws  the  weight  of  its  choice,  and  of  the  influence  resulting 
from  choice,  upon  the  side  of  one  law  or  the  other,  the  issue  of 
the  antinomy  is  actually  decided.  On  the  one  side  is  a  law, 
or  a  system  of  laws,  that  binds  the  Self  within  the  confines  of 
what  we  call  Nature,  —  working  blindly  and  in  fixed  mechani- 
cal fashion  along  a  seemingly  endless  chain  of  causes.  On 
the  other  side  is  another  law  which,  with  an  equal  absolute- 
ness of  imperative,  sets  before  the  Self  a  course  of  conduct, 
to  follow  which  demands  breaking  over  the  limitations  of  the 
former  law,  in  the  effort  to  realize  its  own  destiny  through 
conscious  fidelity  to  an  ideal.  Between  the  two  laws,  as  it 
were,  and  under  perpetual  limitations  from  them  both,  stands 
the  Self  and  exercises  its  choice.  Thus  it  becomes,  from  the 
ethical  point  of  view,  either  more  and  more  enslaved  by  the 
one  law,  or  more  and  more  free  by  habitually  choosing  to 
follow  the  other  law.  This  is,  indeed,  a  picture  of  actual 
experience;  perhaps  no  one  else  has  more  forcefully  pre- 
sented it  than  has  Kant  himself.  It  is  undoubtedly,  by  its 
very  nature,  a  description  of  a  conflict  —  and,  even,  in  some 
sort,  of  a  contradiction  —  of  ruling  principles  which  forces  us 


416  ALLEGED  "ANTINOMIES" 

to  the  agnostic  position  in  respect  of  its  satisfactory  under- 
standing, but  which  is  practically  solved  by  all  men  in  the 
courses  of  conduct  which  they  pursue. 

But  this  is  not,  as  Kant  claims,  an  Antinomy  of  Pure  Rea- 
son, an  irreconcilable  contradiction  of  thesis  and  antithesis, 
which  spring  alike  out  of  the  very  nature  of  cognitive  faculty, 
and  yet  are  both  equally  invincible  in  their  appeal  to  "  proof." 
The  appearance  of  this  sort  of  an  antinomy  is  removed,  when 
the  origin,  nature,  and  legitimate  applications  of  the  concep- 
tion of  causation  are  correctly  understood.  It  is  thus  shown 
that  our  conceptions  of  "  causality,  according  to  the  laws 
of  nature,"  and  of  "  another  causality,  that  of  freedom,"  both 
originate  in  one  and  the  same  experience  of  the  reflective 
Self. l  Both  are  true,  in  so  far  as  they  are  formed  in  recog- 
nition of  the  fundamental  facts  of  that  cognitive  experience 
in  which  they  originate.  They  become  apparent  contradic- 
tions, inherent  in  the  very  life  of  reason  itself,  only  when  one 
(or  both)  of  the  two  conceptions  has  been  framed  in  disre- 
gard of  our  total  experience,  has  been  hypostasized,  and 
then  illegitimately  extended  for  the  explanation  of  what  re- 
quires them  both  to  be  kept  in  mind.  Here,  too,  as  every- 
where else,  explanation  is  limited  by  the  inexplicable ;  the 
analysis  of  cognition  leads  to  inquiries  before  which  the  ag- 
nostic attitude  is  alone  reasonable. 

In  the  fourth  example  of  "  the  antinomy  of  pure  reason " 
both  thesis  and  antithesis  are  products  of  such  complicated  and 
doubtful  speculative  efforts  that,  in  the  form  in  which  Kant 
here  states  and  "  proves  "  them,  they  can  no  more  be  charged 
to  the  account  of  human  cognitive  faculty  in  general  than  can 
the  a  priori  system  of  physics  which,  in  the  Transcendental 
Logic,  he  also  takes  for  granted  as  rationally  necessary  truth. 
How  much  confidence  in  the  Absolute  it  is  necessary  to  attrib- 
ute to  reason,  and  to  make  use  of  in  the  very  structure  of 

1  See  Psychology,  Descriptive  and  Explanatory,  chapters  xxi.  and  xxvi., 
and  Philosophy  of  Mind,  chapters  vii.  and  viii. 


ALLEGED  "ANTINOMIES"  417 

knowledge  itself,  will  be  briefly  considered  later  on.  Indeed, 
from  this  point  on  the  entire  "  Critique  of  Pure  Reason  "  be- 
comes, more  than  before,  a  series  of  doubtful  speculative  pro- 
positions of  a  negative  and  sceptical  kind,  set  over  against 
other  speculative  propositions,  rather  than  a  genuine  criticism 
of  human  cognitive  faculty. 

The  recent  work  of  Mr.  Bradley  follows  the  method  of 
Kant  in  one  important  respect.  It  is  an  acute  and  deter- 
mined attempt  to  set  forth  the  inherent  contradictions  that 
afflict  our  mental  processes  in  their  claim  to  form  true,  as 
distinguished  from  merely  logical,  judgments.  Unlike  Kant, 
however,  Mr.  Bradley  does  not  avowedly  aim  to  "  remove 
knowledge"  in  order  "to  make  room"  for  faith  —  in  God, 
Freedom,  and  Immortality.  The  rather  does  he  strive  to 
destroy  confidence  in  all  human  cognition  of  things  as  they 
"  appear  "  to  us,  in  order  to  make  room  for  a  theoretical  and 
speculative  construction  of  Reality,  of  a  highly  scholastic 
sort.  Under  the  title  of  "  Appearance,"  the  whole  world  of 
minds  and  things,  as  actually  known  to  man,  is  discovered 
to  be  a  collection  of  irreconcilable  contradictories.  The  solu- 
tion of  these  contradictions  is  to  be  found  in  a  certain  con- 
ception of  Reality.  This  conception  is  supposed  to  be  framed, 
not  on  a  basis  of  confidence  in  the  truth  of  experience,  — 
whether  cognitive  or  practical,  whether  of  knowledge  or  of 
faith  and  conduct,  —  but  in  the  speculator's  power  to  absorb 
the  contradictions  into  the  structure  of  an  abstraction.  "  Ap- 
pearance "  is  made  a  term  to  cover  all  the  realities  of  which, 
or  about  which,  we  have  knowledge ;  but  appearance  is  denied 
reality  because  it  is,  eo  ipso,  self-contradictory.  "Reality" 
is  then  speculatively  constructed,  with  the  utmost  disregard 
of  all  our  actual  cognitions,  either  of  or  about  any  known 
realities.  It  seems  then  that,  while  Mr.  Bradley  in  his  de- 
structive effort  agrees  with  Kant,  in  his  constructive  result 
he  only  sets  up  one  of  those  very  products  of  speculation  as  to 
"  Reality,"  which  Kant  deemed  mere  negative  and  problemat- 

27 


418  ALLEGED  "ANTINOMIES" 

ical  concepts  and  intended  to  render  forever  "  hors  du  com- 
bat "  for  all  truly  critical  minds. 

Again,  a  protest  is  entered  against  this  entire  way  of  con- 
ducting mixed  epistemological  and  metaphysical  discussions. 
If  the  work  of  criticism  ends  by  dismissing  man's  cognitive 
faculty  from  the  front  door,  by  reason  of  a  complete  loss  of 
confidence  that  it  can  give  us  the  truth  of  Reality,  no  valid 
idea  corresponding  to  this  term  can  be  surreptitiously  intro- 
duced by  the  back  door,  either  in  the  name  of  faith  or  of 
philosophic  speculation.  If  knowledge  is  not  for  all  men 
something  other  than  an  "  appearance,"  then  all  academic  ab- 
stractions are  forever  prejudged ;  they  present  an  absolutely 
worthless  claim  when  they  mark  themselves  with  the  label  of 
"  Reality."  If  the  common  categories,  in  that  fundamental 
use  of  them  which  every  cognitive  judgment  illustrates  and 
enforces,  are  in  no  wise  valid  for  the  really  existent  world, 
then  all  the  criticisms  of  scholastic  epistemology  and  the 
speculations  of  scholastic  metaphysics  are  no  better,  "  truth- 
wise,"  than  a  madman's  dream. 

But,  as  has  already  been  declared,  we  do  not  admit  the  ex- 
istence of  antinomies,  or  contradictions  either  of  fact  or  of 
law,  so  inherent  in  the  very  life  of  cognitive  faculty  as  to 
destroy  its  power  to  present  us  with  a  trustworthy  picture  of 
Reality.  So  far  as  alleged  antinomies  are  actual,  they  belong 
to  the  very  nature  of  human  knowledge  as  positive  and  worthy 
of  confidence ;  they  enlarge  the  true  picture  of  the  nature  of 
the  actual  World.  But,  for  the  most  part,  they  are  only 
alleged  and  spurious ;  they  are  due  to  the  faulty  abstractions 
of  the  critic ;  and  this  seems  to  us  to  be  eminently  true  of 
Mr.  Bradley's  doctrine  of  antinomies. 

The  most  convenient  example,  perhaps,  to  select  for  testing 
Mr.  Bradley's  agnosticism  with  reference  to  the  ontological 
applicability  of  the  categories  is  that  afforded  by  his  chapter l 
on  "  Relation  and  Quality."  The  antinomy  which  he  here 

i  Appearance  and  Reality,  chapter  iii. 


ALLEGED  "ANTINOMIES"  419 

wishes  to  establish  is  stated  by  him  as  follows:  "Relation 
presupposes  quality,  and  quality  relation.  Each  can  be  some- 
thing neither  together  with,  nor  apart  from,  the  other." 
While,  then,  they  are  the  necessary  forms  of  all  our  knowledge 
of  "  appearance,"  —  a  term  which  covers,  in  the  author's  use 
of  it,  the  entire  field  of  all  concrete  realities,  both  Self  and 
Things,  as  we  seem  to  know  them  in  their  actual  relations, 
—  "  the  vicious  circle  in  which  they  turn  is  not  the  truth  about 
reality."  If  we  may  throw  this  inherent  contradiction  into 
somewhat  more  definitely  antinomic  form  than  Mr.  Bradley 
himself  has  given  it,  we  may  put  the  sad  case  of  our  cognitive 
faculty  thus :  — Thesis :  qualities  are  unintelligible,  are  nothing, 
without  relations  ;  antithesis :  qualities,  taken  together  with  re- 
lations, are  equally  unintelligible  and  incapable  of  giving  the 
truth  of  reality.  Therefore,  our  cognitive  faculty,  which,  con- 
fessedly, must  know  the  Self  and  all  things  as  having  qualities 
and  standing  in  relations,  is  shown  to  be  afflicted  with  such 
inherent  and  irremovable  contradictions  that  it  can  give  no 
"truth  about  reality."  Thus  is  accomplished  the  object  of  this 
chapter,  as  of  every  other  chapter  in  the  first  Part  of  the  entire 
work  (Book  I.  Appearance),  —  namely,  "to  show  that  the 
very  essence  of  these  ideas  is  infected  and  contradicts  itself." 
Now  we  unhesitatingly  contend  that  the  thesis  of  this  an- 
tinomy, when  its  language  is  rendered  intelligible  by  being 
adapted  to  express  the  facts  of  our  actual  cognitions,  is  neither 
metaphysically  unintelligible  nor  infected  and  self-contradic- 
tory in  respect  of  the  essence  of  its  ideas.  But  the  antithesis 
is  unintelligible,  either  because  its  terms  must  be  left  as 
barren  abstractions  that  have  no  ground  of  standing  in  our 
actual  experiences,  or  else  because  they  are  made  to  be  in- 
fected and  self-contradictory  by  having  a  meaning  put  into 
them  which  they  need  not  bear.  Both  thesis  and  antithesis 
are  faultily  expressed.  For  while  the  naive  and  common- 
sense  meaning  of  their  terms  has  been  transcended,  the 
meaning  which  those  same  terms  come  to  have  to  a  con- 


420  ALLEGED   "ANTINOMIES" 

sistently  critical  epistemology  and  metaphysics  has  been 
either  obscured  altogether  or  expressed  unhappily.  "  To  find 
qualities  without  relations  is  surely  impossible,"  says  Mr. 
Bradley ;  and  to  the  truth  of  this  proposition  one  may  assent, 
while  demurring  at  the  abstract  form,  with  its  implication 
that  qualities  and  relations  might  be  conceived  of  either  as 
themselves  realities,  or  as  some  sort  of  appendages  or  super- 
ficial qualifications  of  reality  as  it  appears  to  us. 

By  the  term  "  Quality,"  as  applied  to  things,  men  always 
mean  to  designate  certain  facts  of  cognitive  experience  which 
require,  and  admit  of,  further  analysis.  The  qualities  of 
things  are  those  immediately  known  or  inferred  modes  of 
their  behavior,  both  active  and  passive,  by  which  we  classify 
them  (sort  them  out  according  to  the  ways  in  which  they 
answer  the  question,  QuoJ,i»T)^  recognize  them  when  we 
meet  them  again,  and  so  adapt  our  conduct  with  respect  to 
them.  This  conception  of  qualities  —  not  as  themselves  ex- 
isting, either  "  together  with  "  or  "  apart  from  "  relations,  but 
as  the  modes  of  the  being  and  doing  of  realities  —  is  a  com- 
plex conception.  It  summarizes,  in  fact,  a  number  of  the 
so-called  categories.  To  argue  about  it  as  though  it  were  some 
simplex,  stuck  to  the  thing  or  inherent  permanently  in  it  as  in  a 
core  of  abstract  reality  devoid  of  qualifications,  is  true  neither 
to  popular  impressions  nor  to  critical  metaphysics.  When 
we  have  analyzed  the  conception  of  quality,  we  do  find  that 
it,  like  all  those  conceptions  which  enfold  the  concrete  facts 
and  ultimate  laws  of  knowledge,  involves  much  that  is  mysteri- 
ous,—  much  before  which,  unless  we  can  rise  to  the  higher 
and  more  ideal  points  of  view,  we  have  to  maintain  the  agnos- 
tic attitude.  But  this  is  a  very  different  thing  from  accusing 
this  idea  of  being,  in  its  "  very  essence,"  infected  and  self- 
contradictory. 

The  complex  conception  of  concrete  things  as  variously 
qualified  involves  the  category  of  "  Relation."  But  this 
category  does  not  admit  of  further  analysis.  The  idea  of 


ALLEGED  "ANTINOMIES"  421 

"  relation  in  general "  is  but  an  abstraction  derived  from  a 
cognitive  experience  which  always  gives  us  reality  as  actually 
related  in  some  concrete  and  definite  way.  On  the  epistemo- 
logical  side,  then,  we  only  recognize  the  very  nature  of  the 
thought-process,  as  it  enters  into  all  knowledge,  by  saying  that 
"to  know  is  to  relate."  On  the  ontological  side,  we  only 
describe  the  most  fundamental  and  positive  characterization 
of  all  known  beings,  when  we  affirm  that  they  are  all,  in  as 
far  as  known  or  conceivable,  actually  related.  To  deny  either 
of  these  truths  is  theoretically  to  render  that  commerce 
between  the  cognitive  subject  and  the  cognized  object,  in 
which  knowledge  itself  consists,  quite  impossible.  The  fullest 
and  most  ultimate  experience  in  which  our  consciousness  of 
these  truths  originates  has  already  been  sufficiently  described. 
If  by  calling  the  description,  or  any  of  the  ideas  involved  in 
it,  "  unintelligible  "  Mr.  Bradley  means  that  nothing  more 
simple  and  ultimate  than  that  which  is  stated  in  terms  of 
these  ideas  can  be  said  about  knowledge  and  reality,  this  is 
true.  But  this  is  quite  a  different  charge  to  bring  against 
the  activities,  forms,  and  content  of  human  cognition,  from 
that  of  being,  in  their  very  essence,  "  infected  "  and  "  self- 
contradictory." 

That  "  qualities  are  nothing  without  relations  "  is,  then, 
true  as  tested  by  the  nature  of  our  actual  concrete  cognitions 
of  things.  But  when  Mr.  Bradley  undertakes  the  proof  of  the 
antithesis,  that  "  qualities  taken  together  with  relations  are 
equally  unintelligible,"  he  begins  to  labor  heavily.  In  fact, 
his  entire  so-called  argument  seems  here  to  go  quite  wide  of 
its  aim.  That  "nothings  cannot  be  related, and  that  to  turn 
qualities  in  relation  into  mere  relations  is  impossible,"  no  one 
need  hesitate  to  admit.  But  what  the  critic  himself  makes  a 
show  of  doing,  is  to  turn  the  mere  abstract  idea  of  relation  in 
general  into  an  entity,  in  order  to  set  up  some  kind  of  a 
deadly  quarrel  between  it  and  the  equally  abstract  and  more 
unjustifiable  hypostasis  of  the  conception  of  quality.  Indeed, 


422  ALLEGED  "ANTINOMIES" 

is  not  this  the  "  vice  in  procedure "  which  clings  to  all  the 
so-called  antinomies  ?  The  actual  forms  of  the  most  indubit- 
able cognition  of  all  realities  are  treated  as  though  they  were 
themselves  realities ;  and  they  are  then  set  into  a  position  of 
contradiction  which  arises  from  the  attempt  to  find  in  some 
one  or  more  of  them,  separately,  a  complete  account  of  all  the 
forms  in  which  the  concrete  realities  reveal  themselves  to  the 
mind.  Surely  this  procedure  ought  not  to  be  so  easily  pos- 
sible after  Kant's  treatment  of  "  the  Amphiboly  of  Reflective 
Concepts"  and  of  the  unsatisfactoriness  of  all  merely  con- 
ceptual views  of  the  World.1 

The  outcome  of  the  discussion  of  this  chapter  has  a  certain 
quasi-ethical  significance,  to  which  fuller  consideration  will 
be  given  in  other  connections.  For  human  reason,  even  in  — 
and  especially  in  —  its  work  of  self-criticism,  must  recognize 
its  own  inherent  responsibilities  and  its  undiminished  regard 
for  teleological  considerations.  To  the  critical  use  of  reason, 
in  some  sort,  applies  the  rule  which  it  is  so  ready  to  call  to 
mind,  in  the  case  of  less  important  individual  differences : 
Falsus  in  uno,falsus  in  omnibus.  This  must  not,  however,  be 
held  in  such  way  as  to  deny  that  error  may  mingle  with  truth ; 
much  less  to  affirm  that  truth  is  not  to  be  attained  at  all  if 
any  risk  or  taint  of  error  seem  to  threaten  all  human  inquiries 
after  truth.  But  if  the  entire  cognitive  faculty  of  man  is,  by 

1  With  Mr.  Bradley 's  aims,  and  with  many  of  his  most  important  positive 
conclusions,  we  find  ourselves  not  only  in  full  sympathy  but  in  large  measure  of 
agreement.  But  no  ontological  conclusions  whatever,  whether  largely  agreeing 
with,  or  wholly  dissenting  from,  those  at  which  the  author  arrives  in  his  second 
Book  (on  "  Reality  "),  can  possibly  be  trusted,  after  the  sceptical  and  agnostic 
outcome  of  his  first  Book  (on  "  Appearance ")  has  been  accepted.  When 
once  the  constitutional  forms  of  human  cognition  have  been  shown  to  be  ideas 
that  have  mere  seeming,  and  that  are  in  "  their  very  essence  "  "  infected  "  and 
"  self-contradictory,"  there  remains  nothing  further  to  be  done  in  the  way  of 
establishing  a  rational  ontology.  Any  ontology  thus  constructed  is  prejudged ; 
it  is  already  twice  plucked  up  by  the  roots,  dead  and  withered,  before  it  can  put 
in  the  "  appearance  "  even  of  a  truly  rational  life.  And  if  the  critic  does  such 
things  in  the  case  of  the  green  tree  of  his  own  metaphysics,  what  will  not  the 
next  critic  do  in  the  case  of  that  same  tree  when  it  has  already  become  dry  ? 


ALLEGED  "ANTINOMIES"  423 

its  constitution,  compelled  to  think  and  to  accept  the  truth  of 
squarely  contradictory  principles,  or  to  frame  ideas  which 
implicate  correlated  forms  of  the  being  and  behavior  of  the 
really  existent  World,  so  that  they  shall  "  in  their  very 
essence  "  be  "  infected  "  arid  "  self-contradictory,"  it  is  some- 
thing worse  than  intellectual  vanity  to  elaborate  systems  of 
metaphysics.  Nor  do  we  believe  that  faith  will  ever  come  to 
occupy  the  room  made  vacant  by  the  removal  of  knowledge  in 
this  way.  For  experience  is  some  sort  of  a  unity ;  and  unless 
what  appears  to  man  as  reality  can  somehow  be  known  as 
"  true  reality  "  (Mr.  Bradley's  strange  phrase)  we,  as  critics 
of  the  cognitive  faculty,  are  "  of  all  men  most  miserable." 


CHAPTER  XV 

TEUTH  AND  ERROR 

TT  may  seem  to  some  readers  that  the  trustworthiness  of 
J-  our  cognitive  judgments,  the  value  for  the  transcendent 
of  our  experience,  and  the  validity  in  general  of  human 
knowledge,  have  been  over-emphasized.  The  preliminary 
survey  of  the  nature  of  knowledge  showed  that  its  problem  is 
proposed  to  philosophy  in  the  form  of  a  question :  How  can 
cognition,  which  is,  psychologically  considered,  a  subjec- 
tive affair,  a  mere  process  in  consciousness,  be  also  trans- 
subjective  or  ontologically  referent,  so  as  to  put  the  mind 
in  possession  of  truth  respecting  Reality  ?  From  a  sceptical 
beginning,  and  following  carefully  the  critical  method,  posi- 
tive and  comprehensive  conclusions  have  been  reached. 
In  all  cognition,  the  reality  of  the  Self  —  that  it  is,  and 
what  it  is  —  is  immediately  and  indubitably  given;  and  the 
reality  of  Things  is  also  given,  —  that  they  are,  immediately 
and  indubitably,  and  what  they  are,  if  we  accept  in  good 
faith  the  postulate  of  their  being  and  behaving  after  the 
analogy  of  the  self-known  Self.  To  doubt  thus  much  is 
theoretically  to  deny  the  possibility  of  knowledge.  When 
subjected  to  critical  analysis  the  very  denial  is  found  to  be 
inherently  contradictory  and  absurd.  All  knowledge  is,  in- 
deed, on  the  one  hand,  limited  by  barriers  of  accepted  and 
experienced  fact,  and,  on  the  other  hand,  by  the  necessity 
of  responding  with  an  agnostic  answer  to  many  question- 
ings after  reasons  and  causes.  He,  however,  who,  because 
he  must  often  say,  "  I  do  not  know, "  refuses  to  accept  and 


TRUTH  AND  ERROR  425 

live  by  the  positive  truths  implicated  in  the  affirmation, 
"I  do  know,"  will  never  attain  to  intellectual  peace.  He 
may  even  commit  the  unpardonable  sin  against  the  spirit 
of  truth. 

Moreover,  the  nature  and  growth  of  human  knowledge  is 
such  that  truth,  as  contrasted  with  error,  must  always  be 
the  fundamentally  positive  and  more  inclusive  thing  in 
human  experience.  Critics  of  our  common  faculty  of  cogni- 
tion are  quite  too  much  accustomed  to  pessimistic  conclu- 
sions. To  take  Schopenhauer's  estimate  of  the  negative 
results  of  Kant's  criticism  for  an  example :  "Kant  discovered 
the  subjectively  conditioned  and  therefore  entirely  immanent 
nature  of  knowledge,  that  is,  its  unsuitableness  for  trans- 
cendental use,  from  the  constitution  of  knowledge  itself; 
and  therefore  he  very  appropriately  called  his  doctrine  the 
*  Critique  of  Reason. ' "  l  Now,  to  translate  this  statement 
into  the  terms  which  our  analysis  has  shown  to  be  descrip- 
tive of  the  exact  facts  of  the  case,  it  amounts  to  saying :  The 
only  trustworthy  outcome  to  a  thorough  examination  of 
human  cognitive  faculty  is  the  discovery  that,  although  its 
trans-subjective  reference  and  "  transcendental  use  "  is  im- 
manent in  its  very  constitution,  we  are  somehow  forced  to 
call  this  aspect  of  it  an  illusion  or  a  lie.  But  the  very 
terms  "subjectively  conditioned,"  "immanent  nature," 
"transcendental  use,"  "constitution  of  nature,"  etc.,  are 
either  pregnant  with  conclusions  that  contradict  the  scepti- 
cal outcome  of  the  Kantian  Critique,  or  else  they  are  them- 
selves utterly  empty  and  meaningless.  Ultimately,  even  the 
words  "  illusion "  and  "  lie "  are  found  to  derive  all  their 
meaning  from  conceptions  of  truth  and  reality  which  remain 
unimpaired  by  the  sceptical  process.  And  the  fundamental 
illusion  of  the  critic  himself  may  be  said  to  consist  in  the 
impression  that  he  can  thus  give  the  lie  to  the  common  con- 
sciousness, with  its  undying,  warm  conviction,  of  the  truth 

1  The  World  as  Will  and  Idea,  Hi.,  p.  27. 


426  TRUTH  AND  ERROR 

of  Self  and  of  Things,  and  yet  save  the  results  of  his  own 
criticism.  This  is  indeed  the  Trpwrov  tyevSos  of  epistemo- 
logical  agnosticism. 

The  amount  of  Truth  in  the  present  possession  of  the 
human  mind  may  always  be  looked  upon  as  small  indeed 
compared  with  the  conceivable  extent  of  truth.  What  this 
means  so  far  as  concerns  the  truth  that  z's  in  present  posses- 
sion, has  already  been  made  sufficiently  clear  in  treating  of 
the  nature,  kinds,  degrees,  and  limits  of  human  knowledge. 
A  becoming  modesty  will  always  characterize  the  genuine 
spirit  of  science  and  philosophy,  in  view  of  the  smallness  of 
the  field  of  present  attainment,  as  compared  with  the  incom- 
mensurable magnitude  of  the  still  unknown.  And  since  the 
growth  of  scientific  and  philosophical  knowledge  has  always 
so  largely  consisted  in  the  correction  of  mistakes  of  fact 
and  errors  of  conception,  there  is  more  than  sufficient  reason 
to  suspect  that  large  admixtures  of  the  untrue  still  remain 
with  what  now  appears  to  be  true.  The  compatibility  of 
this  experience  with  a  positive  confidence  in  present  posses- 
sions of  truth,  and  in  the  validity  of  the  distinction  between 
truth  and  error  by  reference  of  both  to  Reality,  is  a  subject 
for  epistemological  inquiry.  But  we  are  now  interested  in 
inquiring  whether  the  valid  claims  of  scepticism  and  agnos- 
ticism have  not,  of  late,  been  greatly  overestimated.  A 
generation  ago  Mr.  Herbert  Spencer1  set  out  to  establish  an 
elaborate  doctrine  of  nescience;  but  he  began  with  the 
announcement  of  his  conviction  that  there  is  "a  soul  of 
truth  in  things  erroneous."  Since  then,  this  original  con- 
viction appears  to  have  been  quite  too  much  overlaid  with 
the  great  mass  of  dogmatic  agnosticism  accumulated  by  both 
the  master  and  his  more  or  less  confiding  disciples.  Even 
Mr.  Spencer's  more  positive  conclusions  as  to  the  possibil- 
ity of  knowing  the  Ultimate  Reality  have  suffered  unwar- 
rantably in  the  same  way.  We,  too,  believe  that  there  is 

1  First  Principles,  chapter  i. 


TRUTH  AND  ERROR  427 

a  "  soul  of  truth  in  things  erroneous. "  Indeed,  we  believe 
that  all  errors  "  live  and  move  and  have  their  being, "  only 
in  and  by  the  possession  of  this  warm  and  active  principle 
of  truth.  And  as  the  soul  of  truth  that  was  originally  in 
things  erroneous  is  recognized  and  developed  into  its  due 
characteristic  form  and  proportions,  the  husk  of  errors  falls 
off  and  perishes. 

To  state  the  same  experience  in  another  way  :  We  actually 
find  much  more  truth  than  error  in  all  those  judgments  of 
men  which  seem  to  them  to  embody  their  most  assured  cog- 
nitions. He  who  would  accept  them  all  for  true,  rather 
than  false,  and  would  diligently  seek  so  as  finally  to  dis- 
cover the  "  soul  of  truth "  in  them,  would  thereby  gain,  a 
much  more  satisfactory  and  valid  picture  of  Reality,  than 
would  he  who  should  content  himself  with  the  negative  and 
agnostic  results  of  epistemological  criticism.  To  win  truth, 
it  is  better  to  present  a  genial  than  a  repulsive  side  toward 
the  common  opinions  and  beliefs  of  men.  For  truth  is  a 
mistress  who  does  not  like  a  sour  and  distrustful  counte- 
nance, however  resolute  and  masterful.  Her  chosen  favorite 
is  courteous  as  well  as  persistent;  trustful  toward  his  mis- 
tress, while  not  being,  on  due  occasion,  without  jealousy  for 
her  honor.  In  every  field  of  truth  —  practical,  scientific, 
philosophical,  religious  —  trust  is  more  productive  than  dis- 
trust; and  certain  positive  conclusions  are  usually  more  jus- 
tifiable and  better  worth  the  making  than  are  any  negative 
and  agnostic  conclusions.  The  great  brain  and  the  big 
heart  of  the  multitude  of  men  are  the  seats  of  true  thoughts 
and  of  fitting  emotions;  they  give  birth  to  the  important 
truths  with  reference  to  the  being  of  man  and  to  the  all- 
embraciug  Reality,  however  frequently  they  go  astray  in  some 
of  their  functions.  Human  science,  no  matter  how  doubtful 
about  its  facts,  and  faulty  in  its  generalizations,  is  much 
more  to  be  credited  than  discredited  as  regards  the  truth  of 
its  total  message  when  that  message  is  rightly  understood. 


428  TRUTH  AND  ERROR 

Nor  was  there  ever  propounded  a  system  of  metaphysics  so 
recondite,  illogical,  or  fantastic,  that  it  did  not  embrace 
more  of  fundamental  truth  than  of  falsehood.  And  that 
portion  of  human  cognitive  experience  in  which  arise  and 
grow,  as  in  a  fruitful  soil,  the  mental  and  emotional  atti- 
tudes of  men  toward  God,  Freedom,  and  Immortality  can- 
not be  torn  out  by  violence  or  excised  by  the  keen  knife  of 
sceptical  criticism,  without  leaving  in  unrecognizable  frag- 
ments the  whole  body  of  such  experience. 

It  is,  then,  in  some  respects  a  harder  task  for  epistemo- 
logical  doctrine  to  determine  how  error  arises,  to  show  its 
reality  in  experience,  and  to  furnish  the  means  for  testing 
and  detecting  it,  than  to  perform  the  same  offices  for  truth. 
This  task  cannot,  however,  be  shirked  or  set  one  side  on 
account  of  its  inherent  difficulties ;  nor,  because  truth  is  the 
more  abiding  and  inclusive  thing  in  human  experience,  can 
we  assign  to  error  only  a  negative  meaning  and  a  wholly 
subordinate  significance.  Not  a  few  students  of  the  episte- 
mological  problem  have  chosen  to  regard  all  error  as  either 
partial  truth,  or  else  as  the  merely  negative  limit  of  truth 
on  its  way  from  lower  to  higher  stages  of  expression  and 
degrees  of  development.  There  are  certain  important  con- 
siderations implied  in  giving  this  turn  to  our  phrasing  of 
an  answer  to  the  epistemological  problem.  Error  is  essen- 
tially wo^-truth;  but  one  can  scarcely  reverse  this  proposition 
and  declare  that  truth  is  essentially  not-error.  Moreover, 
as  has  already  been  implied,  no  erroneous  proposition  can 
be  posited,  and  no  false  judgment  can  be  framed,  except  with 
reference  to  some  positive  correct  proposition  as  express- 
ing a  true  judgment.  So  that  there  is  a  certain  justification 
for  the  paradoxical  statement :  he  who  blunders  most  miser- 
ably is  nearer  the  absolutely  correct  than  the  absolutely 
incorrect  announcement  of  a  real  cognitive  experience ;  and 
he  who  lies  most  outrageously  tells  more  of  what  is  true 
than  of  what  is  false,  in  the  very  terms  of  his  lying  propo- 


TRUTH  AND  ERROR  429 

sition.  Only  Satan  can  be  "a  liar  from  the  beginning;" 
and  of  the  manner  of  his  accomplishing  this  remarkable 
feat  of  escaping  all  truth,  one  can  scarcely  form  a  defensible 
conception. 

Still  further,  many  —  perhaps  we  should  not  go  too  far  in 
declaring,  that  all  —  of  the  most  important  truths  dawn 
upon  the  consciousness  of  the  individual  and  of  the  race  in 
the  form  of  half-truths.  In  the  history  of  scientific  progress 
few  things  are  more  instructive  than  to  notice  how  the  most 
wonderful  classes  of  new  facts,  and  the  strangest  discoveries 
regarding  the  classification  and  formulation  of  these  facts 
under  laws  which  express  the  relations  they  sustain  to  the 
present  system  of  scientific  cognitions,  have  their  anticipa- 
tory stages  and  fitful  periods  of  obscure  apprehension. 
Seldom,  indeed,  is  the  earlier  recognition  given  to  the 
truth  at  which  science  aims,  other  than  very  fragmentary 
and  partial.  Similarities  and  differences  are  not  defini- 
tively marked  out;  and  even  the  most  fixed  terms  of  relation 
to  the  fundamental  existences  of  nature  are  expressed  in  a 
faltering  and  changeable  way.  An  interesting  example  of 
this  progress  in  knowledge  may  be  found  in  the  history  of 
bacteriology. 

Nor  does  the  more  "  finished  "  form  of  science  feel  that 
it  is  capable  of  expressing  the  full  and  final  significance 
of  a  single  fact  in  human  cognitive  experience ;  much  less 
that  any  of  its  laws  are  the  complete  and  unchangeable 
expression  of  the  being  and  transactions  of  that  part  of  our 
experience  which  we  call  "Nature"  (whether  regarded  as 
naturans  or  naturata  —  to  borrow  a  distinction  of  long  stand- 
ing). Now,  from  this  fractional  character  belonging  to  all 
the  truth  we  know,  or  think  we  know,  it  seems  to  follow 
that  the  other  fraction  necessary  to  complete  the  totality  of 
the  apparent  sphere  of  human  knowledge,  is  entitled  to  be 
called  error  rather  than  unknown  truth.  This  would  appear 
to  justify  the  epistemological  conclusion  that  all  our  truth 


430  TRUTH  AND  ERROR 

is  half-error  (more  or  less).  Such  a  conclusion  might,  in 
turn,  be  converted  into  the  proposition  that  all  error  is 
partial  truth ;  *because  it  is  solely  due  to  negative  limita- 
tions inherent  in  the  very  nature  of  truth  itself.  For, 
finally,  how  shall  ignorance  and  error  be  distinguished, 
since  men  are  perpetually  bound  to  assume  that  they  know 
what  they  are  only  entitled  to  believe  or  to  opine,  and  since 
all  the  truth  actually  known  is,  after  all,  not  more  than 
fractionally  true  ? 

We  have  little  taste  for  the  dispute  over  "  poles  of  opposi- 
tion," over  "negatives  "  and  "positives;"  or  for  the  debated 
question  whether  all  truth  can  be  reduced  to  a  kind  of  illu- 
sion or  error,  and  all  error  to  a  partial  or  limited  truth. 
As  in  the  more  purely  ethical  realm,  sin  and  wrong-doing 
are  not  mere  negations  or  limitations  of  righteousness,  so  in 
the  more  purely  intellectual  realm  does  the  case  stand  with 
error  and  truth.  Error  is  not  merely  the  negative  of  truth ; 
mistaken  judgment  is  not  always  to  be  defined  as  simple 
failure  to  express  correctly  the  whole  of  one's  cognitive 
experience.  Every  cognitive  judgment,  from  the  epistemo- 
logical  point  of  view,  is  just  as  positive  when  it  negates  as 
when  it  affirms ;  and  there  may  be,  of  course,  quite  as  much 
error  in  denying  what  is  true  as  in  affirming  what  is  false. 
Moreover,  to  affirm  of  "  all "  what  is  true  only  of  "  some  " 
is  an  erroneous  proposition,  — a  judgment  not  only  logically 
faulty  but  also  metaphysically  false.  But  to  fall  short  of 
affirming  of  "all,"  because,  although  the  universal  truth  of 
the  proposition  may  be  clear  to  other  minds,  the  judgment 
has  not  yet  become  cognitive  for  our  mind  in  this  universal 
form,  is  to  be  "  true "  in  the  noblest  sense  of  the  word 
applicable  to  the  functioning  of  a  human  intellect. 

On  the  one  hand,  the  ethically  wrong  has  respect  to 
matters  of  conduct  more  purely.  Judging,  and  propounding 
the  results  of  judging,  are  indeed  matters  in  which  will 
takes  part.  Our  analysis  of  the  nature  of  cognition  has 


TRUTH  AND  ERROR  431 

shown  this  to  be  true.  Much  human  error,  too,  is  mixed 
up  with  more  or  less  of  wrong-doing;  and  the  relations 
between  "conduct,"  in  the  ethical  meaning  of  the  word,  and 
false  and  erroneous  judgment  are  far  from  being  loose  or 
remote.  Nor  can  these  relations  easily  be  confined  to  any 
particular  kind  of  truth,  so  as  to  exclude  from  the  observa- 
tions and  experiments  of  physical  science  the  moral  defects 
of  self-conceit,  insincerity,  and  selfishness,  while  admitting 
that  so-called  religious  faith  or  metaphysical  speculation 
may  easily  be  corrupted  in  this  way  so  as  to  destroy  the 
fractional  "soul  of  truth  in  things  erroneous."  On  the 
other  hand,  the  so-called  laws  under  which  the  two  kinds  of 
action  take  place  are  not,  by  any  means,  precisely  the  same. 
Wrong-doing,  as  distinguished  from  going  wrong  in  judg- 
ment, stands  in  quite  a  different  relation  to  righteousness 
from  that  in  which  error,  as  distinguished  from  wilfully 
sophisticated  or  slovenly  judgment,  stands  to  truth.  The 
intellectual  conditions  which  determine  that  form  of  action 
we  call  the  cognitive  judgment  are  more  strict  and  inflexi- 
ble than  are  those  forms  of  conception  under  which  moral 
conduct  in  general  takes  place.  Here  we  discover  the 
sphere  in  which  differences  in  the  kinds  of  truth  become 
most  important. 

The  main  principle  of  differentiation  now  to  be  recognized 
is  the  relation  which  the  alleged  truth  sustains  to  the  emo- 
tional and  practical  life  of  man.  Every  court  of  justice 
brings  out  the  fact  that  errors  of  sense -perception  are  fre- 
quent in  all  matters  of  observation  by  the  senses.  The 
same  thing  every  psychological  laboratory  also  can  easily 
demonstrate.  What  the  court  of  justice  shows  more  clearly 
than  does  the  psychological  laboratory  is  this :  such  errors 
are  most  frequent  in  the  direction  of  interests  of  an  emo- 
tional and  practical  sort.  But  every  director  of  a  physical 
or  chemical  laboratory  knows  how  many  mistaken  induc- 
tions have  in  the  past  been  built  into  the  body  of  so-called 


432  TRUTH  AND  ERROR 

"science,"  and  how  difficult  it  is  to  exclude  such  inductions 
from  the  constant  edification  of  that  body.  When  "  experts  " 
meet  to  testify  on  different  sides  in  the  same  court  of  justice 
we  learn,  in  larger  measure,  one  set  of  reasons  why  so-called 
scientific  conclusions  do  not  agree.  Moreover,  the  attitude 
of  cognition  toward  Reality  is  necessarily  such  that  the 
cognitive  judgment  feels  the  fuller  force  of  the  inescapable 
and  seemingly  rigid  character  of  concrete  entities.  Con- 
duct, although  under  such  control  from  the  really  existent 
World  of  things  that  it  cannot  be  determined  in  disregard 
of  its  being  and  behavior,  is  itself  a  much  more  flexible  and 
fluid  thing  in  its  relation  to  that  world.  My  pleasing  and 
willing  undoubtedly  have  much  to  do  with  my  knowing 
at  all ;  and  also  with  what  I  know,  if  I  know  at  all.  Yet 
men  do  not  say  that  it  pleases  them,  or  that  they  will, 
to  frame  their  cognitive  judgments  thus  and  so  rather  than 
otherwise;  but  they  affirm  that  they  conduct  themselves, 
within  much  wider  boundaries,  as  they  please  or  as  they 
will. 

The  fuller  explanation  and  significance  of  such  considera- 
tions as  the  foregoing  best  become  manifest,  so  far  as 
epistemology  requires,  in  connection  with  the  theory  of 
knowledge  thus  far  adopted.  Detailed  discussion  of  the 
means  for  establishing  truths  and  detecting  errors,  theory 
of  method  in  general,  and  the  technique  of  investigation 
and  proof  belonging  to  the  particular  sciences,  offer  many 
interesting  problems  into  which  we  cannot  enter.  Our  present 
aim  is  simply  to  show  what  meanings  are  properly  attached 
to  the  terms  by  which  men  distinguish  truth  and  error; 
how  the  distinction  originates  in  accordance  with  principles 
determining  the  growth  of  knowledge ;  and  what  are  some  of 
the  more  general  criteria  that  may  fitly  be  employed  for 
making  and  defending  the  distinction.  In  a  word,  the 
epistemological  problem  under  discussion  is:  How  is  the 
fact  of  knowledge  consistent  with  the  existence  of  both  error 


TRUTH   AND  ERROR  433 

and  truth  ?  Here,  too,  as  in  the  discussion  of  every  episte- 
mological  problem,  reference  must  be  constantly  had  to 
Reality;  and  thus  the  problem  is  not  merely  epistemological 
but  is  also  ontological.  For  who  shall  arbitrate  in  the 
friendly  game  or  bitter  fight  between  so-called  truth  and 
so-called  error?  It  is  only  in  the  somewhat  contemptible 
arena  of  the  ancient  sophist,  or  in  the  mildly  inane  "  debat- 
ing society  "  of  modern  times  that  men  appeal  to  rhetoric  or 
to  logic  alone  to  adjudge  the  case  disputed  between  them. 
In  what  is  significantly  called  "  real  life "  the  issues  at 
bottom,  however  their  presence  may  be  overlooked  or  con- 
cealed, have  regard  to  something  other  than  the  judicious 
ordering  of  persuasive  arguments  or  an  apparently  strict 
conformity  to  the  rules  of  the  syllogism.  These  issues 
submit  only  when  Reality  itself  decides  the  appeal  made  to 
it.  For  the  question  at  issue  reads  best  as  follows :  What 
is  true,  and  what  is  false  ?  —  not,  Who  has  stated  his  case 
most  judiciously  and  convincingly  ?  Now,  in  fact,  this  very 
appeal  embodies  the  entire  theory  of  knowledge  as  it  has 
already  been  stated  and  defended.  Mere  arguments  submit 
to  the  arbitrament  of  the  logician  or  the  rhetorician.  They 
ask  for  judgment  framed  by  the  mind  that  moves  methodi- 
cally and  smoothly  from  accepted  premises  to  derived  con- 
clusion. But  alleged  cognitions  make  an  appeal  to  the 
being  and  transactions  of  the  really  existent  world ;  and  they 
are  often  obliged  to  carry  this  appeal  through  lengthy  and 
tortuous  processes  of  ratiocination  (as,  for  example,  in  the 
case  of  an  inquiry  like  that  concerning  the  "  localization  of 
cerebral  function,"  or  "the  origin  of  the  synoptic  Gospels  "). 
But  "rough  and  ready,"  if  only  it  will  enable  the  mind  to 
envisage  and  interpret  what  is  actual,  is  a  most  acceptable 
motto  for  him  who  aspires  to  know  the  truth. 

It  is  obviously  the  correct  doctrine  of  the  cognitive  judg- 
ment to  which  one  must  turn  in  order  to  discover  the  pro- 
founder  meaning  of  the  words  "  truth  "  and  "  error. "  It  is 

28 


434  TRUTH  AND  ERROR 

admitted  by  all,  even  by  those  who  take  the  merely  logical 
or  psychological  points  of  view,  that  truth  and  error  can  be 
affirmed  or  denied  of  judgments  alone.  He  who  simply  has 
sensations,  ideas,  feelings,  conative  impulses,  as  such,  — 
whatever  the  characteristics  of  these  psychical  phenomena  in 
themselves  may  be,  —  cannot  be  either  commended  for  truth- 
fulness or  condemned  for  falsehood.  To  a  second  being 
who  affirms  or  denies  the  existence  of  these  psychoses  in  the 
consciousness  of  the  first  being,  the  term  "true  "  or  "false  " 
may  be  applied.  For  epistemology,  however,  it  is  important 
to  go  beyond  this  point:  only  alleged  cognitive  judgments 
can  properly  be  called  either  true  or  false.  Truth  and  error 
belong  to  the  attempts  of  men  at  knowledge.  We  think 
correctly  or  incorrectly,  if  we  may  conceive  of  ourselves  as 
merely  thinking ;  we  act  aptly  or  ineptly,  whenever  we  can 
isolate  action  from  the  cognitive  judgments  which  it  so 
frequently  expresses  or  applies ;  and  we  feel  appropriately  or 
inappropriately,  if  we  regard  merely  the  affective  aspect  of 
consciousness  in  its  relation  to  other  subjective  factors. 
But  it  is  when  we  think,  feel,  and  will,  in  such  manner  as 
to  set  the  total  Self  into  those  relations  toward  Reality 
which  the  cognitive  judgment  embodies  and  expresses,  that 
we  become  capable  of  apprehending  truth  or  of  committing 
error.  He  who  affirms  "I  know,  etc.,"  must  either  have 
truth  on  his  side,  or  error  against  him ;  and  the  testing  of 
the  affirmation  is  always  made  in  the  form  of  an  appeal  to 
that  which  men  call  "  actual  "  or  "  matter-of-fact. " 

By  Truth,  then,  all  men  understand  such  a  judgment, 
affirming  cognition,  as  corresponds  to  the  being  and  the 
transactions  of  the  really  Existent.  By  error  they  under- 
stand such  a  judgment  as  lacks  this  correspondence.  And 
since  any  alleged  cognitive  judgment  may  partially  corre- 
spond and  partially  fail  to  correspond,  they  recognize  that 
"fractional  validity"  of  many  cognitive  judgments  to  which 
attention  has  already  been  called.  Now,  at  this  point  there 


TRUTH  AND  ERROR  435 

is,  of  course,  a  very  tempting  opportunity  for  the  confirmed 
epistemological  sceptic  and  agnostic  to  enter  his  old-time 
objections  and  protests.  For  is  not  every  alleged  cognitive 
judgment  itself  as  thoroughly  subjective  as  are  mere  sensa- 
tions, ideas,  and  the  most  primary  impulses  ?  And  what 
can  be  meant  by  "the  being  and  transactions  of  the  really 
Existent,"  that  is  not  a  complex  and  abstract  product  of  the 
subjective  processes  of  imagination  and  thinking  ?  How 
can  an  appeal  be  taken  to  Reality,  as  though  reality  could 
get  into  the  mind  in  some  other  way  than  as  "  appearance  " 
in  the  form  of  alleged  cognitions  ?  What  there  is  of 
substance  in  these  very  objections  and  protests  has  already 
been  examined  at  great  length.  After  we  have  finally 
parted  from  him  who  doubts  or  denies  the  very  possibility 
of  knowledge,  we  cannot  consent  to  tread  again  with  him 
the  same  worn  and  weary  path  through  the  darkness  of 
nescience  and  doubt  toward  the  light  of  assured  and  intelli- 
gent cognition. 

What,  however,  shall  be  said  in  answer  to  those  who, 
like  Mr.  Bradley,1  deny  that  any  truth  is  given  in  the  judg- 
ment, so  far  as  it  is  cognitive  and  categorical,  and  on  the 
contrary  affirm:  "Any  categorical  judgment  must  (the  italics 
are  ours)  be  false. "  "  The  subject  and  the  predicate  in  the 
end  cannot  either  be  the  other."  "Quality  either  adds 
nothing  or  adds  what  is  false,"  etc.  Strictly  understood 
and  accepted,  such  a  view  of  the  cognitive  judgment  would 
seem  to  place  us  in  the  position  of  the  man  who,  having  all 
his  life  long  implicitly  believed  in  the  truth  of  dreams,  at 
last  dreamed  that  he  was  infallibly  assured  of  the  falsity  of 
all  dreams.  Thus  was  he  doomed  to  the  perpetual  circle  in 
arguendo :  "  If  all  dreams  are  true,  then  this  dream  is  true, 
and  all  dreams  are  false.  But  if  all  dreams  are  false,  then 
this  dream  is  false  and  some  dreams  may  be  true."  What 
a  prospect  is  this,  of  forever  grinding  at  the  mill,  while 

1  Appearance  and  Reality,  pp.  361  and  362  (note). 


436  TRUTH  AND  ERROR 

starving  for  lack  of  some  small  grist  of  truth !  Understood, 
however,  as  its  author  seems  to  intend,  these  statements  give 
a  self-destructive  form  to  the  attempt  to  unite  the  outcome 
of  a  sceptical  epistemology  with  a  rational  system  of  ontology. 
But  men  do  not  mean  to  identify  the  "  being  "  of  subject  and 
predicate,  whenever  they  pronounce  categorical  judgments; 
neither  do  they  understand  that  the  truth  of  their  thinking 
is  dependent  upon  the  metaphysical  identification  of  this 
thinking  and  what  is  real.  Nor  do  they,  any  more  than 
does  Mr.  Bradley  himself,  regard  Reality  as  a  rigid  Entity, 
totally  independent  of  all  change,  movement,  and  Life,  which 
must  be  known  completely  and  as  it  eternally  is,  if  it  is  to 
be  known  at  all. 

The  further  qualification  that  judgments  are  to  be  con- 
sidered either  true  or  false  only  in  so  far  as  they  assume  to 
be  cognitive,  enables  us  much  more  clearly  to  distinguish 
the  nature  and  to  define  the  limits  of  both  truth  and  error. 
Here  another  consideration  respecting  the  nature  of  all 
actual  judgment  becomes  important.  For  every  judgment 
exists,  as  a  realized  product  of  the  Self,  only  after  it  has 
been  both  framed  and  pronounced.  So  far  as  psychological 
analysis  can  throw  its  light,  whether  derived  from  introspec- 
tion or  from  experiment,  into  the  very  centre  of  this  subject, 
judgment  is  dependent  for  its  very  realization  upon  some 
form  of  motor  activity.  Men  universally  incline  to  assev- 
erate with  one  kind  of  motor  symbolism  and  to  deny  with 
another.  They  posit,  plant,  ground  their  propositions:  or 
they  withhold,  uproot,  and  withdraw  them.  They  detect 
themselves  as  setting  into  some  form  of  action,  often  in 
talking  over  with  themselves,  the  series  of  judgments  which 
leads  up  to  the  terminal  judgment;  and  this  they  love  to 
"establish"  and  make  clear  and  impregnable  to  themselves 
by  repeating  it  over  and  over  again.  Whether  such  motor 
expressions  of  the  judgment  must  be  accounted  essential  for 
the  individual  in  order  that  he  may  recognize  and  adopt  its 


TRUTH   AND   ERROR  437 

truth  as  his  very  own,  or  not,  it  is  obvious  that  one  man's 
cognitions  can  be  made  the  subjects  of  another  man's  judg- 
ments only  as  they  are  set  into  reality  by  some  motor  ex- 
pression. The  acceptable  human  form  of  expression  for  the 
cognitive  judgment  is  language.  That  is  to  say,  truth  and 
error  are  customarily  predicated  of  alleged  cognitive  judg- 
ments as  expressed  in  verbal  propositions. 

And  now  in  considering  the  nature  of  truth  and  error,  and 
in  endeavoring  to  determine  defensible  limits  between  them, 
the  task  becomes  twofold.  The  question  as  to  the  truth  or 
falsity  of  any  judgment  is  thus  always  connected  with,  and 
generally  much  complicated  by,  this  question:  What  does 
the  judgment,  as  propounded,  actually  mean,  both  to  the  one 
judging  and  to  others  who  are  asked  to  pass  judgment  upon 
it  ?  For  what  a  judgment  really  is  cannot  be  known  apart 
from  what  the  judgment,  as  expressed,  means  to  the  inquirer 
after  its  truth  or  falsehood.  So  that  theoretically  the  ex- 
perience becomes  necessary  which  we  find  to  be  actual  in 
our  every-day  intercourse  with  men:  We  cannot,  from  the 
primary  point  of  view  of  epistemology,  pronounce  any  judg- 
ment either  true  or  false  until  we  know  what  such  judgment 
intends  to  affirm  or  deny  as  understood  by  the  mind  that  makes 
the  judgment.  It  has  been  seen,  however,  that  cognitive 
judgments  are  not  perfectly  rigid  and  unchanging  connec- 
tions, established  once  for  all  between  concepts  which  are 
themselves  conceived  of  as  unchanging  entities.  Nor  do  the 
words  in  which  men's  judgments  are  announced  have  a  fixed 
and  unchanging  meaning.  Far  from  it;  each  one  of  them 
embodies  the  attempt  to  catch  and  formulate  an  indefinite 
number  of  doings  of  the  really  existent  world  of  Self  and  of 
Things.  Reality  is  much  too  varied  and  agile  in  its  life- 
expressions,  as  well  as  lofty  and  profound  in  its  principles 
of  behavior,  to  be  caught,  firmly  held,  and  fully  encom- 
passed, by  as  many  words  as  the  average  man  can  master  the 
meanings  of.  Moreover,  each  one  of  these  words  changes 


438  TRUTH  AND  ERROR 

its  meaning  —  on  the  one  hand,  gaining  a  richer  content, 
and,  on  the  other,  being  more  precisely  delimited  —  as  the 
growth  of  knowledge  goes  on  in  the  individual  and  in  the 
race.      Still  further,    all  words,    in   those    meanings  which 
afford   the   most   direct  and  inviolable  expressions  of  the 
reality  known,  are  apt  to  be  employed  figuratively.     Every 
student  of  language  knows  how  children  and  childish  peoples 
express  the  truth  as  it  is  revealed  to  them,  and  indeed  often 
most  fitly  and  beautifully,  in  figures  of  speech.     The  highest 
abstractions  of  science   and  philosophy   can  find  words  in 
which   to  embody  themselves    only  as   they  consent  to   be 
more  or  less  artistic  and  indefinite  in  the  meanings  assigned 
to  those  words.     Has  it  not  been  proved,   indeed,  that  the 
truth  of  our  most  assured  cognitive  judgments   concerning 
what  the  world  of  things  really  is  can  be  vindicated  only  by 
regarding  it  as  being  and  behaving  like  the  Self  ?     Its  quali- 
fications are  known  as  they  really  are,  only  on  the  supposi- 
tion that  the  analogies  embodied  in  our  language  are  justifiable 
figures  of  speech.      We  are  far,  indeed,  from  holding  that  no 
distinction  is  to  be  made  between  so-called  "real  truth" 
and  error,   or   that  all    contentions  for  the   truth   are   best 
resolved  by  the  acknowledgment  that,  after  all,  the  dispute 
is  only  a  logomachy.     On  the  contrary,  there  are  not  a  few 
subjects  where  contest  for  the  truth  against  error  is  a  war 
to  the  knife;  and  the  ongoing  revelation  of  Reality  to  the 
human   mind  will  practically   annihilate  one  party  to  the 
strife.     Yet,  in  general,  a  most  fruitful  way  of  helping  our- 
selves and  others  into  the  truth,  and  of  eliminating  error, 
is  to  bring  about  an  understanding  as  to  what  each  alleged 
cognitive  judgment  actually  means  to  the  one  propounding 
it.     Socratic  midwifery  alone  will  never  rid  the  woods  of 
all  manner  of  daemons  of  falsehood,  sprites  of  untamed  fancy, 
and  unsubstantial  ghosts  of  doubt;  but  it  will  much  improve 
and  multiply  the  regions  held  by  the  family  that  derives  its 
lineage  from  essential  truth,  the  faithful  mother  of  a  chosen 
race. 


TRUTH  AND  ERROR  439 

Truth  and  error,  then,  are  most  fitly  attributed  to  judg- 
ment, but  only  in  so  far  as  it  is  cognitive,  and  is  under- 
stood according  to  the  meaning  given  to  its  expression  by 
the  judging  mind.  He  whose  only  failure  consists  in  the 
misemployment  of  terms  for  announcing  his  cognitive  judg- 
ment commits,  indeed,  a  serious  fault.  His  judgment,  if 
adopted  by  others  as  their  own,  in  accordance  with  the 
meaning  they  are  forced  or  deceived  into  giving  his  terms, 
may  be  wholly  or  largely  false.  But  if,  with  the  meaning  he 
gives  the  terms,  the  judgment  announces  a  fact  or  a  remoter 
relation  in  reality  as  known  to  him,  it  is  more  properly 
called  incorrect  in  expression  than  false  or  erroneous  as 
tested  by  a  standard  of  truth.  This  limitation  of  the  episte- 
mological  significance  of  the  terms  "truth"  and  "error" 
enables  us  to  understand  two  classes  of  subjects  that  stand 
farthest  apart,  as  ordinarily  considered.  We  are  accustomed 
to  being  told  that  the  most  certain  and  unassailable  of  all 
truths  are  the  truths  of  mathematics ;  but  that  the  senses  of 
men  move  in  the  peculiar  realm  of  illusion  and  error.  Yet 
are  not  both  truth  and  error  always  defined  with  reference  to 
realities  ?  And  what  student  of  the  purest  and  highest 
mathematics  is  so  ardent  as  to  claim  that  his  formulas 
represent  the  real  being  and  actual  transactions  of  things  ? 
On  the  other  hand,  where  do  men  come  face  to  face  with  the 
reality  of  things,  in  such  way  that  all  human  knowledge  of 
them  depends  ultimately  upon  the  validity  of  this  inter- 
course, except  in  the  field  of  sense-perception  ?  Must  it, 
then,  be  admitted  that  the  most  assured  truth  gives  no 
knowledge  of  reality;  and,  on  the  contrary,  that  all  seem- 
ing knowledge  of  the  reality  of  things  is  mere  "appearance  " 
or  sheer  "  illusion  "  ? 

What  is  the  nature  of  the  truth  which  mathematics 
imparts;  and  what  is  the  relation  in  which  this  truth  stands 
to  actuality,  whether  of  Self  or  of  Things  ?  The  correct 
answers  to  these  questions  confirm  instead  of  contradicting 


440  TRUTH  AND  ERROR 

the  theory  of  knowledge  which  we  are  advocating.  For 
the  premises,  reasonings,  and  conclusions,  of  the  "purest" 
mathematics  are  properly  called  true  only  so  far  as  they  are 
known  to  correspond  to  the  real  being  and  actual  behavior 
of  our  world  of  cognition.  And  yet,  of  all  kinds  of  knowl- 
edge mathematics  and  formal  logic  are  remotest  from  reality, 
—  most  "  pure "  in  proportion  as  they  are  most  unreal, 
imaginary,  and  abstract.  Nor  is  this  an  occult  truth  which 
needs  the  assistance  of  epistemology  to  disabuse  the  mind 
of  the  mathematician  or  logician  of  his  erroneous  pretence 
of  knowledge.  For  example,  let  us  suppose  that  the  conclu- 
sion of  some  course  of  algebraic  reasoning  might  be  correctly 
expressed  by  the  formula  x  —  y^s  _  \ ;  in  what  sense  can 
the  judgment  of  such  a  formula  be  said  to  be  known  to 
be  true  ?  Only  as  reference  is  made  to  the  being  and 
transactions  of  something  really  existent.  If  it  is  proposed 
to  test  the  truth  or  falsity  of  the  conclusion,  appeal  may  be 
had  to  a  series  of  mathematical  terms  united  by  signs  of 
equality  and  inequality,  of  addition  and  subtraction,  etc., 
upon  a  sheet  of  paper,  to  see  if  repeated  inspection  by  the 
senses  will  reveal  any  "  error "  in  them ;  or  some  other 
series  of  other  terms,  based  upon  the  same  premises,  may  be 
employed  in  order  to  test,  or  prove,  the  correctness  of  the 
suspected  series.  But  the  truth  obtained  in  this  way  is  not 
expressed  when  it  is  satisfactorily  shown  that  two  little 
black  marks  crossed  (rr),  and  two  short  lines  parallel  (=), 
and  a  v  with  a  long  arm  extended  on  its  right  side  (^/  ), 
etc.,  are  placed  precisely  in  such  an  order,  rather  than  some 
other,  upon  this  particular  real  sheet  of  paper  here  dis- 
played. Surely,  this  is  not  the  meaning  for  reality  which 
such  a  series  of  algebraic  judgments  possesses.  But  neither 
is  it  meant  that  any  really  existent  thing  has  its  being,  or 
its  behavior,  correctly  represented  to  imagination  or  to 
thought,  either  by  the  statical  relations  of  these  symbols,  or 
by  the  movement  of  the  argument  through  which  the  state- 


TRUTH  AND  ERROR  441 

ment  of  the  relations  is  reached.  The  "  purer  "  and  "  higher  " 
our  mathematics  becomes,  the  less  conceivable  does  it 
become  that  any  thing  or  number  of  things  should  "  realize  " 
the  truth  of  such  processes  in  its  own  real  being  and  actual 
behavior.  Even  if  the  supposed  case  be  one  of  applied 
mathematics,  the  truth  of  any  conclusion  such  as  x=  y «3  _  i 
does  not  depend  upon  some  real  thing  being  discovered,  to  be 
called  x,  and  some  other  real  thing  to  be  called  y ;  and  then 
upon  these  two  going  through  exceedingly  complicated  but 
mutually  dependent  processes  in  order  actually  to  arrive  at 
a  sort  of  statical  agreement  with  each  other  —  after  the 
pattern  of  the  successive  strifes  and  partial  reconciliations 
in  the  thought  of  the  mathematician  which  end  in  peace 
being  declared  on  terms  of  x  —  ^yS  _  i.  The  truth  of 
mathematics,  indeed,  gets  an  approximately  exact  realiza- 
tion whenever  things,  being  taken  quantitatively  and  measured 
and  counted,  as  all  things  may  be,  undergo  changes  in  size 
or  in  spatial  relations,  corresponding  to  those  symbolized 
by  algebraic  and  geometrical  formulas  and  demonstrations. 
But  it  must  not  be  overlooked  that  the  truth  in  reality  of  the 
formulas  and  demonstrations,  as  thus  regarded,  is  always 
only  approximate  and  conditional.  That  is,  so-called  mathe- 
matical judgments  are  held  to  be  true  for  things  only  in  case  cer- 
tain presupposed  conditions  continue  to  be  fulfilled  by  the  things; 
and  even  then  only  in  so  far  as  the  things  are  quantitative 
and  quantitatively  related.  But  what  the  actual  conditions 
are  under  which  things  exist,  and  act,  and  change,  can 
only  be  known  by  our  experience  with  them ;  and  this  expe- 
rience bases  itself  upon  cognition  of  the  actuality  only  so 
far  as  cognition  takes  place  through  the  senses. 

What  now,  however,  shall  be  said  as  to  the  truthfulness  of 
the  axioms  and  demonstrations  of  "pure  "  mathematics,  both 
arithmetical  or  algebraic,  and  geometrical  ?  The  answer  to 
this  question  depends  upon  understanding  how  the  funda- 
mental conceptions  of  mathematics  originate,  and  why  it  is 


442  TRUTH   AND   ERROR 

possible  to  arrange  them  in  satisfactory  form.  This  answer 
may  be  given  in  the  form  of  a  paradox.  The  pure  mathe- 
matics are  so  undoubtedly  true,  because  they  are  so  inde- 
pendent of,  and  one  might  even  say  so  false  to,  the  real 
being  and  actual  transactions  of  things.  For  things  always 
are  much  more  and  other  than  merely  quantitative ;  and  the 
behavior  of  things  is  determined  by  many  other  considera- 
tions than  those  of  the  mathematical  order.  Water  is,  for 
example,  approximately  described  in  terms  of  quantitative 
analysis,  by  the  formula  H20.  But  both  oxygen  and  hydro- 
gen gases,  and  the  compound  resulting  from  their  combina- 
tion in  terms  of  this  formula,  are,  and  are  able  to  accomplish, 
infinitely  more  than  this  formula  describes.  When,  then, 
mathematics  becomes  perfectly  pure,  the  truth  it  tells  con- 
cerns nothing  more  than  the  way  in  which  a  certain  kind  of 
our  thinking  enables,  or  compels,  us  to  relate  its  own  abstrac- 
tions. For,  so  far  as  pure  geometry  knows,  its  space  is  a  pure 
abstraction ;  and  so  far  as  pure  algebra  knows,  its  numbers 
and  symbols  stand  for  pure  abstractions.  The  truth  here  is 
the  truth  known  as  determined  by  a  certain  thinking  and  ide- 
ating activity  of  the  Self.  1  not  only  know  that  I  can  regard 
things  as  capable  of  being  counted  and  as  actually  extended 
in  space,  but  I  also  know  that  I  can  abstract  from  all  the 
concrete  qualities,  definite  dimensions  and  space  relations, 
which  things  as  known  by  the  senses  have;  and  I  can  then 
treat  the  concepts  of  number,  and  of  space  qualities  and 
relations,  as  though  these  concepts  were  themselves  real 
objects  of  knowledge.  The  truth  thus  immediately  known 
belongs  to  the  actual  behavior  and  real  life  of  the  Self;  it 
can  be  carried  over  into  the  world  of  things  only  upon  the 
bridge  of  that  analogy  to  which  reference  has  so  frequently 
been  made. 

We  see,  then,  that  the  truth  of  mathematics  is  twofold 
in  its  aspects;  but  in  both  of  its  aspects  it  looks  toward 
Keality  for  its  sole  testing  and  justification.  In  so  far  as 


TRUTH  AND  ERROR  443 

experience  shows  us  that  things  actually  obey  the  laws  of 
number  and  of  quantity,  our  mathematical  judgments  may  be 
cognitive  of  things.  Truth  and  error  are  not  abstractions 
here.  Every  building  that  falls,  evejy  bridge  that  goes 
down,  because  of  miscalculation  as  to  amount  of  strains  or 
strength  of  materials,  is  a  terribly  real  proof  of  this.  But 
when  sophists  deny  motion  or  change  in  reality,  because 
the  mind  can  so  juggle  with  mere  abstractions  as  to  show, 
with  logical  satisfaction,  that  the  arrow  cannot  really  fly  or 
Achilles  actually  overtake  the  tortoise,  they  are  more 
ingenious  in  needless  self-deception  than  either  knowing  or 
wise.  For  human  cognition  affirms  that  the  arrow  does  fly ; 
Achilles  and  all  the  spectators  know  that  he  soon  overtakes 
the  tortoise.  The  puzzle  which  arises  when  it  is  asked, 
How  can  this  really  be  ?  does  not  require  any  alteration  of 
judgment  as  to  the  nature  either  of  knowledge  or  of  reality. 
For  the  puzzle  consists  in  the  sceptic's  foolish  effort  to 
make  that  true  for  the  actual  world  of  things  which  is  only 
conceivably  possible  even  when  abstractions,  recognized  as 
such  on  one  side,  are,  on  the  other  side,  identified  with 
realities  in  a  false  and  illogical  way. 

How  far  Reality  follows  human  mathematical  conceptions 
and  imaginings  as  to  what  It  might  be  and  do,  if  things  were 
only  a  system  of  merely  quantitative  beings,  we  have  no  off- 
hand means  of  saying.  The  appeal  must  be  made  to  cogni- 
tions of  sense.  We  learn  a  little  more  about  this  as  our 
knowledge  of  things  grows.  But  the  complete  failure  of 
mathematics  to  describe  and  to  explain  the  actual  World 
is  increasingly  apparent.  The  theoretical  ass  of  Buridanus 
could  not  move  toward  either  bundle  of  hay,  so  subject  was 
his  "being"  to  the  dominion  of  mere  quantity.  But  then 
there  really  is  no  such  ass  anywhere,  —  not  even  among  the 
most  primordial  and  undifferentiated  of  the  forms  of  pro- 
toplasm, or  the  atomic  subjects  of  the  law  of  chemical 
equivalence.  We  ourselves  are  governed  by  various  other 


444  TRUTH  AND  ERROR 

considerations,  and  have  many  other  ends  to  realize,  than 
those  of  pure  mathematics.  How  far  this  is  true  of  the 
Other  Self,  man  can  scarcely  be  said  to  know  ;  but  there  are 
certain  reasons  in  human  experience  which  lead  to  the  ap- 
prehension that  It  cannot  be  bound  strictly  by  the  axioms 
and  formulas  of  the  most  speculative  mathematicians. 

From  time  immemorial  the  illusory  and  hallucinatory 
nature  of  that  knowledge  of  things  which  comes  through  the 
senses  has  been  celebrated,  not  only  by  reflective  students  of 
the  phenomena  of  perception  from  psychological  and  philo- 
sophical points  of  view,  but  also  by  poets,  essayists,  and 
religious  enthusiasts.  This  epistemological  conclusion  has 
generally  been  more  or  less  closely  connected  with  ethical 
and  practical  interests.  Thus  the  "  sensuous  "  side  of  things 
has  been  held  to  be  the  seducer  of  the  mind  into  paths  of 
error,  and  of  the  spirit  into  ways  immoral  and  prejudicial  to 
the  interests  of  the  higher  good.  Modern  physical  science 
has  naturally  felt  no  little  repugnance  toward  such  a  view 
of  the  nature,  the  limits,  and  the  tendencies  of  the  cognition 
of  material  things.  It  has  aimed  to  establish  the  superior 
claims  to  exactness  and  certitude  of  this  kind  of  cogni- 
tion;  and  even  to  extend  its  method  by  using  mathematical 
formulas  for  the  expression  of  quantitative  qualifications 
and  relations,  over  all  the  fields  of  human  knowledge.  It 
has  pointed  with  justifiable  pride  to  the  recent  extension  of 
the  dominion  "ruled  over"  by  known  laws;  and  it  has 
expressed  high  hopes  that  the  barriers  to  its  further  almost 
inconceivable  advances  would  even  be  overcome.  All  this, 
it  has  held,  is  happening  so  as  greatly  to  benefit  rather  than 
to  injure  the  practical  and  ethical  interests  of  man.  Of  late 
there  has  been  a  growing  disposition  to  admit  that  "  scientific  " 
knowledge  would  somehow  be  found  to  be  not  wholly  incom- 
patible with  religious  faith  and  emotion,  even  if  the  ancient 
basis  of  accepted  truths  of  religion  were  quite  removed. 
A  certain  curious  inconsistency  of  opinion  has  seemed, 


TRUTH   AND  ERROR  445 

however,  to  characterize  the  modern  defenders  of  physical 
science  as  respects  the  truthfulness  of  the  plain  man's  cogni- 
tive judgments  touching  the  reality  of  things.  On  the  one 
hand,  the  scientific  attitude  toward  sense-perception  is  that 
of  confessed  confidence  and  even  of  deference  amounting  to 
homage.  No  one  more  excites  the  scorn  of  the  "  scientist " 
of  to-day  than  does  the  speculator  who,  like  certain  quondam 
disciples  of  Schelling  or  Hegel,  evolves  a  Natur-philosophie, 
or  elaborate  system  of  metaphysics  of  physics,  from  his  own 
higher  consciousness  in  accordance  with  a  preconceived 
theory  of  "Ultimate  Reality."  "Back  to  nature,"  and  — 
in  all  cases  of  disputed  conclusions  —  again  "  back  to 
nature, "  is  the  inspiring  and  promising  call  of  the  scientific 
Zeitgeist.  But,  of  course,  there  is  no  other  way  to  get  back 
to  nature  than  that  of  regarding  the  facts,  as  they  appear  to 
the  trained  and  careful  observer  through  his  bodily  senses ; 
and  while  modern  instrumental  equipment  furnishes  an 
enormously  increased  range  of  perceptions  within  which 
thought  may  inquire  as  to  what  is  true  and  what  is  false, 
it  contributes  no  wholly  new  order  of  facts  from  which  to 
derive  a  new  standpoint  for  testing  the  truth  and  falsehood 
of  our  preconceptions  touching  the  nature  of  Reality.  The 
highest  powers  of  telescope  and  microscope,  the  most  deli- 
cately sensitized  photographic  plates  or  cunningly  devised 
apparatus  for  spectroscopic  analysis,  the  startling  new  exhi- 
bitions of  "  Roentgen  rays  "  afford,  after  all,  no  less  an  "  ap- 
pearance" to  sight,  a  mere  visual  phenomenon,  than  does  the 
naked  eye  of  the  unscientific  man,  as  he  moves  about  among 
things  visible  for  the  transaction  of  his  daily  business.  In- 
deed, new  doubts  and  wranglings  over  what  is  actually 
observed  constantly  accompany  the  exploration  of  these 
new  fields.  And  the  most  cautious  and  thoughtful  of  ex- 
plorers are  coming  to  confess  that  the  same  frailties  and 
bias  from  intellectual  and  emotional  prejudices  must  be 
guarded  against,  with  even  increased  diligence,  if  truth 


446  TRUTH  AND  ERROR 

and  error  are  to  be  separated  in  the  scientific  observation 
of  things.1 

On  the  other  hand,  it  is  constantly  more  apparent  that  the 
underlying  strata  of  hypothetical  metaphysics  are  quite  as 
extensive  in  the  domain  of  modern  physical  science  as  are 
the  cultivated  fields  of  fact,  open  to  the  inspection  of  all 
observers.  These  facts  afford  the  witness  of  a  general  con- 
fession that  truth  or  error  about  things  is  not  wholly  a  matter 
to  be  determined  by  sense-perception;  and  when  joined  to 
other  facts  and  inferences,  they  may  lead  the  student  of 
epistemology  to  inquire  whether,  after  all,  a  defensible 
theory  of  knowledge  and  of  metaphysics  are  not  equally 
necessary  to  save  both  the  scientific  and  the  ordinary 
cognitions  of  things  from  being  convicted  of  complete  in- 
validity. 

Meantime,  certain  advances  in  the  psychological  science  of 
perception  have  brought  the  epistemological  problem  before 
the  age  in  a  somewhat  new  and  more  emphatic  form.  The 
"new  psychology  "  has  devoted  itself  with  commendable  zeal 
and  industry  to  the  scientific  investigation  of  illusions  and 
hallucinations,  as  mental  phenomena.  No  doubt,  it  has 
sometimes  conducted  these  investigations  with  a  blameworthy 
forgetfulness  that  certain  epistemological  truths  must  be 
assumed  in  any  investigation.  Whenever,  for  example, 
any  theory  of  possible  errors  of  self-consciousness  ("double," 
"triple,"  or  otherwise  hallucinatory)  threatens  the  funda- 
mental cognitions  of  Self,  —  as  real,  unitary,  and  existing 
in  relation  to  other  realities,  both  selves  and  not-selves,  — 
it  is  approaching  the  limits  where  all  its  own  claims  to  scien- 
tific character  must  be  let  slip  into  the  bottomless  pit  of  a 
self-contradictory  nescience.  Whenever,  too,  the  psycho- 
logical theory  of  illusions  and  hallucinations  in  sense- 
perception  assumes  to  involve  in  doubt  all  knowledge  by  the 

1  See,  for  example,  the  instance  referred  to ;  "  Psychology,  Descriptive  and 
Explanatory,"  p.  511,  note. 


TRUTH   AND  ERROR  447 

senses,  it  becomes  itself  involved  in  those  same  primary  fal- 
lacies which  afflict  every  species  of  sceptical  idealism. 

Our  previous  critical  examination  of  the  nature  and  certi- 
tude of  human  knowledge  authorizes  and  compels  the  view 
that  the  terms  "truth  "  and  "error,"  with  their  full  epistemo- 
logical  significance  are  properly  applied  to  sense-perception. 
Even  to  speak  of  illusions  and  hallucinations  of  sense  im- 
plies, in  such  manner  that  the  implicate  cannot,  so  to  speak, 
be  separated  from  experience  or  from  the  terms  chosen  to  ex- 
press it,  that  in  sense-perception  men  reach  cognitive  judg- 
ments which  are  truly  representative  of  the  nature  and  the 
relations  of  things.  Indeed,  from  almost  equally  justifiable 
and  serviceable  points  of  view,  one  may  proclaim  the  appar- 
ent paradox :  Cognitive  judgments,  as  based  upon  immediate 
perception  through  the  senses,  are  in  general  both  true  and 
also  more  or  less  illusory  and  hallucinatory.  This  paradox 
follows  from  the  nature  of  perception  as  a  form  of  knowledge, 
and  from  the  nature  of  the  reality  known  by  perception. 
For,  on  the  one  hand,  perception  is  a  complex  cognitive 
process  that  is  dependent  subjectively  upon  an  indefinite 
number  of  factors,  which  are  different  for  every  individual 
perceiving  mind,  and  which  change  in  the  very  event  of  every 
individual  perception.  But,  on  the  other  hand,  the  reality 
known  in  sense-perception  is  no  rigid  and  unchangeable 
somewhat;  it  is  not  a  thing,  or  a  system  of  things,  that  is 
precisely  one  and  the  same  for  all  perceiving  minds,  or  for 
every  individual  perceiving  mind  in  all  of  its  perceptions. 
Perception,  on  our  part,  is  an  actual  process  of  change,  a 
living  and  moving  achievement  of  mind,  resulting  in  cogni- 
tive judgment.  Nor  is  the  cognitive  judgment  to  which  the 
very  terms  of  truth  and  error  must  be  applied  a  rigid  entity, 
with  its  two  parts,  or  poles,  bound  in  an  adamantine  way  to 
one  another  under  the  logical  principle  of  identity.  Even 
far  more  abundantly  able  is  the  reality  of  things  to  lead  that 
infinitely  varied  Life  which  displays  itself  diversely  (and  all 


448  TRUTH  AND  ERROR 

the  more  wonderfully  and  beautifully  thereby)  to  the  percep- 
tive consciousness  of  every  man.  He  commits  the  funda- 
mental error,  from  which  he  must  retreat  with  shame  and 
confession  before  he  can  know  the  highest  Truth,  who  denies 
that  the  world  of  the  really  Existent  is  actually  rich  enough 
in  content  to  correspond  to  the  varied  cognitive  judgments  of 
all  perceiving  minds. 

This  correct  view  of  truth  and  error  in  sense-perception  is 
not  an  esoteric  mystery,  but  is  something  habitually  con- 
fessed by  the  language  and  action  of  men ;  nor  does  it  render 
unessential  and  inoperative  the  distinction  between  truth 
and  error  in  this  realm  of  cognition.  On  the  contrary,  it 
validates  the  distinction  and  also  gives  it  value  in  the  place 
where  the  teleology  of  all  cognition  is  most  apparent,  — 
namely,  in  our  use  of  things.  To  illustrate  this,  let  us  take 
an  example.  You  rise  in  the  morning,  and  glancing  hastily 
from  the  window  declare  that  it  has  been  snowing  in  the 
night ;  or,  having  put  on  hat  and  coat,  you  go  out  into  the 
open  air  and  soon  affirm,  "  It  is  colder  than  it  was  yester- 
day, and  the  temperature  must  have  fallen  in  the  night." 
But  in  the  one  case  an  error  of  inference  may  be  corrected 
by  pointing  out  that  the  judgment  "  The  ground  is  covered 
with  snow  "  was  due  to  the  glister  of  the  pavement  under 
the  reflected  light;  in  the  other,  consulting  the  thermom- 
eter may  convince  you  that  the  truth  would  be  expressed  by 
simply  affirming,  "I  feel  colder  than  I  remember  to  have  felt 
yesterday,  probably  because  of  a  poor  night's  sleep. "  Such 
mixtures  of  what  men  call  truth  and  error  are,  as  every  one 
admits,  frequently  found  in  the  cognitive  judgments  of  men. 
In  cases  similar  to  the  former  of  these  two,  an  error  of 
fact,  due  to  hasty  observation,  has  led,  by  otherwise  legiti- 
mate inference,  to  an  erroneous  conclusion;  in  the  latter,  an 
indisputable  truth  of  fact  has  been  assigned,  by  illegitimate 
inference,  to  a  wrong  cause.  In  neither  of  these  cases,  nor 
in  any  similar  cases,  is  there  any  element  of  the  experience 


TRUTH  AND  ERROR  449 

which  contradicts  true  epistemological  doctrine  touching 
human  knowledge  of  Self  and  of  Things,  as  it  has  already 
been  defended  against  a  sceptical  idealism  or  agnosticism. 
Nor,  as  a  matter  of  universal  experience,  does  the  admix- 
ture of  illusion  with  truth  impair  the  confidence  of  man- 
kind in  the  possibility  of  some  assured  cognition  through 
the  senses. 

Suppose,  however,  that  two  observers,  equally  confident  in 
the  trustworthiness  of  their  own  senses  and  equally  mindful 
of  the  necessity  of  care  in  the  use  of  the  senses,  pronounce 
opposed  judgments  as  to  any  real  thing  or  actual  event.  The 
final  issue  of  their  self-criticism,  as  well  as  of  their  argu- 
ment with  each  other,  is  the  conclusion,  on  the  part  of  X, 
that  A  is  B ;  and  on  the  part  of  F,  that  A  is  not  B.  Now 
any  one  of  several  suppositions  —  which,  if  needed,  are  satis- 
factory to  men  in  general  and  actually  often  employed  —  will 
save  the  situation  from  the  agnostic  conclusion  that  no 
assured  truth  whatever  is  obtainable  by  the  senses.  Grant- 
ing that  both  X  and  Y  are  communicating  to  each  other  the 
exact  state  of  their  case,  —  that  is,  are  expressing  their 
respective  judgments  of  an  alleged  cognitive  order  so  as  to 
represent  their  actual  experiences,  —  the  following  supposi- 
tions are  possible :  either  one  or  both  of  these  subjects  may 
be  abnormally  defective  in  respect  of  the  particular  sense 
chiefly  involved ;  or  the  intellectual  and  aesthetical  culture  of 
X  may  make  it  possible  for  him  to  perceive  in  A  certain 
qualifications  (B)  which  are  denied  to  Y,  and  therefore 
denied  by  him  as  belonging  to  his  A  ;  or,  again,  it  may  be 
that  A  actually  is  both  what  X  and  Y  understand  by  B  and 
also  by  not-B.  Our  examination  of  the  nature  of  cognitive 
judgment,  as  falling  under  the  supreme  controlling  prin- 
ciple of  identity,  has  shown  us  that  it  is  only  the  particular 
judgment,  as  made  at  this  time  and  by  this  particular  cogniz- 
ing mind,  to  which  the  principle  of  non-contradiction  in  its 
absolute  form  is  properly  applied.  The  principle  of  identity, 

29 


450  TRUTH  AND  ERROR 

in  other  words,  does  not  limit  the  rapidity  of  change,  or  the 
multitude  of  the  phases,  of  which  any  real  things  are  actually 
capable.  But  upon  either  of  the  foregoing  assumptions,  the 
truth  of  both  the  cognitive  judgments  that  seemed  contradic- 
tory would  much  outweigh  the  error  that  could  be  fastened 
upon  either.  In  other  words,  true  knowledge  of  real  things 
by  the  senses  is  understood  by  every  one  to  be  knowledge  of 
them  as  they  appear  through  the  senses.  And  when  it  is 
admitted  that  the  same  real  things  appear  differently  to 
different  minds,  and  even  to  the  same  mind  at  different 
times,  this  is  only  affirming  the  correct  epistemological  view ; 
for  this  view  makes  the  perception  of  things  dependent  upon, 
and  relative  to,  the  perceiving  mind.  This  view  is  also  en- 
tirely compatible  with  the  true  metaphysical  doctrine,  which 
finds  the  ground  of  the  different  appearances,  not  solely  in 
the  differing  mental  processes,  but  also  in  things  themselves. 
For  cognition,  however  gained,  is  of  the  nature  of  a  com- 
merce between  conscious  mind  and  the  really  existent ;  but 
in  this  commerce  both  the  mind  as  cognitive  and  the  really 
existent  are,  so  to  speak,  all  alive.  And  my  truth  is  not 
the  less  truth,  because  it  is  mine ;  nor  is  truth  any  less  cor- 
rectly described  as  a  correspondence  between  the  cognitive 
judgment  and  the  being  and  transactions  of  the  really 
existent,  because  the  details  of  the  form  of  this  corre- 
spondence are  so  indefinitely  varied.  My  perception  of 
things  may  be  as  true  as  yours,  although  it  contains  factors 
which  yours  lacks  or  lacks  factors  which  yours  contains. 
Nor  does  it  follow  that  both  of  us  are  partially  in  error,  or 
even  that  one  of  us  is  wholly  in  error,  because  we  squarely 
and  honestly  judge  seemingly  contradictory  attributes  to 
belong  to  the  things  perceived.  For  you  and  I  are  still  two 
judging  minds,  although  perceiving  the  same  thing.  And 
no  Thing  is  so  mean  and  poor  in  content  that  it  cannot  re- 
veal itself  to  various  minds  in  an  unknown  variety  of  ways ; 
while  the  limitations  of  all  knowledge  by  the  senses  may 


TRUTH  AND  ERROR  451 

very  easily  cause  that  to  appear  as   contradictory   to  you 
which  is  a  matter-of-fact  qualification  of  my  cognition. 

"When,  then,  I  correct  a  so-called  error  of  sense-percep- 
tion, whether  in  myself  or  in  some  one  else,  I  effect  a 
partial  readjustment  of  the  cognitive  attitude  of  some  mind 
toward  reality  which  brings  it  nearer  to  the  standard  of  the 
common  judgment  as  tested  by  the  most  approved  means  of 
determining  that  standard ;  but  I  neither  make  a  confession 
of  the  untrustworthiness  of  sense  to  afford  any  knowledge  of 
reality,  nor  do  I  afford  any  new  kind  of  truth  regarding  the 
relation  in  which  the  reality  stands  to  the  sensuous  experi- 
ence of  men.  The  fundamental  positions  of  epistemological 
theory  are  left  unchanged.  The  conclusions  warranted  in 
the  interests  of  psychological  science  may  be  stated,  on 
both  sides,  in  the  following  language.  "Looking  first  at 
the  side  which  disparages  our  knowledge  of  things  as  they 
really  are,  the  following  considerations  present  themselves : 
All  mental  activities  are  involved  in  common  acts  of  percep- 
tion. ...  In  this  complex  process  (perception  of  the  quality 
of  weight)  the  data  of  sense  are  profoundly  modified  by  cen- 
tral states  and  activities.  .  .  .  What  we  call  normal  percep- 
tion involves  many  illusory  influences  —  not  only  those  of 
physical  and  physiological  origin,  but  even  more  so  those 
due  to  the  functions  of  ideation,  memory,  and  imagination. 
Indeed,  suggestion  and  imagination  control  all  our  percep- 
tion by  the  senses.  .  .  .  But  on  the  positive  side,  confirming 
us  that  somehow  we  perceive  things  as  they  are,  several 
important  facts  may  be  observed.  Illusions  work  according 
to  laws  which  may  generally  be  determined.  As  these 
become  known  we  may  gradually  learn  how  to  rule  out  the 
illusion.  The  known  physical  and  physiological  illusions 
do  not  necessarily  delude  us,  because  we  may  make  allow- 
ance for  them.  Similarly,  we  may  now  make  an  approxi- 
mate allowance  for  the  illusions  of  weight  and  for  all  other 
illusions,  due  to  intellectualized  feelings,  as  they  become 


452  TRUTH  AND  ERROR 

recognized.  The  view  that  illusions  and  hallucinations  do 
not  act  according  to  law  is  as  wrong  as  the  view  that  mind 
in  its  normal  capacity  is  lawless.  The  more  thoroughly  we 
become  acquainted  with  the  laws  of  illusions  the  more 
accurately  will  our  sense-perceptions  fall  in  consensus. " 1 

Once  more,  the  way  in  which  the  emotions,  interests,  and 
plans  of  men,  as  well  as  the  limited  and  imperfect  nature  of 
their  mental  activity,  lead  them  to  blend  remoter  inferences 
with  the  content  of  apperception  as  immediately  given,  affords 
much  of  the  needed  explanation  for  the  illusory  and  halluci- 
natory character  of  many  sense-perceptions.  Here  again, 
however,  a  partial  relief  is  found,  and  an  added  justification 
against  the  conclusions  of  unlimited  scepticism,  in  the  doc- 
trine of  the  sesthetical  character  and  the  teleological  import 
of  all  human  knowledge.  Indeed,  what  we  properly  call 
illusory  and  hallucinatory  from  the  psychological  stand- 
point, may  itself  become  a  guide  and  a  helper  to  an  enlarged 
and  nobler  growth  of  knowledge.  This  is,  in  part,  the  real 
truth  involved  in  Kant's  doctrine  of  an  illusory  logic, 
natural  and  unavoidable  for  all  human  reason.  But,  "in 
part,"  only;  for  truth  given  in  emotional  and  figurative  form 
is  still  truth.  And  the  being  and  behavior  of  the  Self  and 
of  Things,  when  mentally  represented  by  art  and  by  religion, 
may  be  quite  as  faithful  to  the  Reality  as  when  cognized  only 
from  other  and  lower  points  of  view. 

The  existence  and  significance  of  truth  and  error  in  all 
forms  of  science  is  to  be  explained  in  accordance  with  the 
same  principles.  But  the  peculiar  nature  of  so-called  scien- 
tific cognition  involves  special  combinations  of  these  prin- 
ciples. All  science  may,  from  the  epistemological  point 
of  view,  be  considered  either  as  chiefly  descriptive  or  as 
largely  also  explanatory.  As  merely  descriptive,  if  the  term 
"  science  "  is  to  be  applied  to  such  forms  of  knowledge,  the 

i  From  an  article  by  C.  E.  Seashore,  Ph.  D.,  in  "  Studies  from  the  Yale  Psy- 
chological Laboratory,"  iii.,  pp.  66  f. 


TRUTH  AND  ERROR  453 

truth  or  error  belongs  to  the  cognitive  judgment  when 
understood  to  be  affirniatory  of  the  facts  of  self-consciousness 
and  of  sense-perception;  as  a  form  of  knowledge,  then,  the 
epistemological  theory  of  descriptive  science  has  already 
been  sufficiently  considered.  In  general,  however,  no  cog- 
nitive judgments  offer  themselves  for  critical  discernment  of 
the  truth  or  error  which  is  in  them  that  do  not  admit  of 
some  sort  of  express  or  implied  reference  to  grounds.  Both 
the  psychological  and  the  epistemological  doctrine  of  judg- 
ment agree  in  affirming  that  thinking  and  inferring  enter 
into  those  propositions  about  the  truth  or  falsehood  of  which 
men  inquire  and  debate.  But  science  is  pre-eminently 
conceptual  knowledge;  and  thus  to  it,  as  explanatory,  the 
considerations  which  have  been  taken  into  account,  in  refer- 
ence to  the  valid  application  to  Reality  of  the  principle  of 
sufficient  reason,  especially  apply.  The  effort  of  scientific 
research,  as  well  as  the  reward  of  scientific  discovery  and  of 
reflective  thinking,  consists  largely  in  the  improved  and  puri- 
fied conceptions  gained,  and  in  the  more  accurate  and  well 
certified  bringing  of  these  conceptions  together  as  terms  in 
cognitive  judgments  of  general  validity. 

In  order  better  to  understand  what  kind,  and  how  much, 
of  truth  science  affords,  and  what  is  the  nature  of  its  errors, 
one  may  consider  the  subject  in  the  following  way.  The 
general  form  of  the  purely  scientific  judgment  is,  as  has 
already  been  pointed  out,  the  hypothetical :  If  A  is  B  then 
CisD.  As  employed  in  the  extension  of  that  knowledge 
which  scientific  classification  embodies  and  advances,  this 
form  of  judgment  means:  If  any  newly  perceived  being  or 
event  is  like  another  already  conceptually  known  being  or 
event  in  certain  particulars  (if  the  perceived  A  has  the 
attributes  1?),  then  one  may,  with  a  good  degree  of  safety, 
expect  that  it  will  be  like  in  certain  other  particulars ;  and 
one  may  put  all  such  beings  or  events  into  a  common  class 
bearing  the  same  name  (then  one  may  affirm  that,  as  being 


454  TKUTH  AND  ERROR 

(7,  it  has  not  only  the  attributes  B,  but  also  the  attributes 
D).  But  as  employed  in  the  extension  of  explanatory 
knowledge,  this  hypothetical  judgment  is  affirmative  of 
influential  connections  or  causal  relations.  It  may  then  be 
interpreted,  somewhat  crudely,  as  follows:  If  anything  or 
group  of  things  is  behaving  in  a  certain  recognized  way  (if 
A  is  acting  according  to  the  well-known  formula  B),  then, 
looking  backward,  one  may  infer,  that  something  else  has 
furnished  the  reason  for  this,  by  itself  previously  behaving 
in  a  certain  way ;  or  else,  looking  forward,  one  may  expect 
that  the  behavior  of  something  else  in  its  own  way  will  find 
its  reason  in  the  observed  event  (if  the  perceived  event  is  a 
case  of  A-is-B,  then  either  the  ground,  or  the  result,  or 
both,  may  be  inferred  as  a  case  of  C-is-D).  But  the  hypo- 
thetical judgment,  considered  as  in  any  sense  explanatory, 
may  itself  be  thrown  into  the  categorical  form:  " A-is-B" 
and  "  C-is-D  "  then  become  judgments  dependently  connected ; 
but,  after  being  united  in  the  hypothetical  judgment,  "If 
A  is  B  then  C  is  D,"  they  remain  cognitive  judgments  only 
in  case  a  connection  in  reality  is  somehow  established  for 
cognition  between  them.  The  truth  of  the  hypothetical 
judgment,  then,  like  the  truth  of  every  other  form  of  judg- 
ment (like  all  "  truth  ")  must  be  referred  to  the  test  of  reality. 
And  this  reality,  like  all  that  reality  in  correspondence  to 
which  every  alleged  cognitive  judgment  is  tested,  is  neither 
a  merely  formal  correspondence  of  the  judgment  to  the  bare 
rules  of  our  understanding,  nor  a  super-cognitive  entity  (a 
hypothetical  and  abstract  Ding-an-sich) ;  but  it  is  the  reality 
given  in  experience.  How  such  reality  is  given  in  experi- 
ence has  already  been  explained  in  detail,  both  with  reference 
to  Self  and  to  Things. 

So-called  scientific  truth  has,  then,  only  the  same  founda- 
tions to  stand  upon  as  those  upon  which  all  truth  reposes. 
It  is  truth  verified  by  experience  in  the  properly  guarded 
and  well-trained  use  of  cognitive  faculty,  —  especially,  of 


TRUTH  AND  ERROR  455 

course,  on  account  of  the  nature  of  its  objects,  if  it  be  the 
science  of  things  which  is  under  consideration,  in  the  use 
of  the  senses  in  observation,  and  of  thought  in  elaborating 
the  facts  gained  by  observation.  Errors  arise  in  science, 
as  certainly  (however  less  frequently,  if  even  that  can  be 
maintained)  as  in  perceptions  of  the  ordinary,  unscientific 
kind.  To  certain  forms  of  error,  which  depend  upon  the 
remoteness  from  that  testing  of  the  concrete  and  more  imme- 
diate cognitions  of  sense  to  which  thinking  must  carry  its 
processes,  science  is  peculiarly  liable.  But  this  very  liabil- 
ity is  the  price  science  has  to  pay  for  its  superiority  in  the 
height  and  breadth  of  its  conceptual  knowledge.  And  its 
final  aim  is  to  eliminate  progressively  those  sources  of  error 
which  arise  in  the  unguarded  and  untrained  or  ill-trained 
use  of  cognitive  faculty ;  while  at  the  same  time,  by  a  sort 
of  organic  growth,  in  which  many  vital  elements  under  the 
influence  of  common  vital  forces  take  part,  and  by  preserv- 
ing the  sound  portions  of  the  building  of  other  generations 
and  adding  to  them  from  age  to  age,  it  proposes  to  outgrow 
many  of  its  old  mistakes  and  to  improve  the  quality  and 
certainty,  as  well  as  increase  the  number,  of  its  valid  cog- 
nitive judgments. 

What  theory  of  knowledge  and  what  conception  of  the 
nature  of  Reality  are  needed  in  order  to  validate  the  cogni- 
tions of  science?  How  shall  our  minds  escape  the  doubt 
whether  it  be  not  all  —  this  goodly  temple  of  modern  knowl- 
edge with  its  foundations  upon  the  bed-rock  of  fact  and  its 
stones  inspected  by  skilled  and  critical  eyes  as  they  are  pains- 
takingly built  into  the  structure  —  no  more  truly  valid  trans- 
subjectively  than  is  a  fair  and  stately  dream  ?  That  I  am 
not  the  whole  of  this  world,  that  things  other  than  myself 
exist,  I  can  by  no  possibility  doubt.  But  what  is  there  that 
my  science  gives  me  which  is  true  as  corresponding  to  this 
Other  Being  and  to  its  actual  Transactions  ?  We  see  no  way 
to  answer,  and  no  prospect  of  the  discovery  of  any  way,  that 


456  TRUTH  AND  ERROR 

neglects  the  faithful  use  of  the  fundamental  postulate  to 
which  reference  has  so  frequently  been  made.  The  "  scien- 
tist" who  does  not  accept  the  validity,  and  the  value,  for 
Reality,  of  the  conception  of  things  as  a  system  self-organiz- 
ing after  the  analogy  of  the  self-known  Self,  can  only  com- 
fort his  doubts  with  the  beauty  and  formal  consistency  of  his 
own  dream.  Knowledge  would  seem,  somehow,  to  be  denied 
to  him  except  on  terms  of  repentance  and  of  faith. 

The  more  fruitful  discussion  of  the  Sources  of  Error 
must  be  in  the  main  psychological  and  logical.  But  the 
philosophical  theory  of  knowledge  enables  us  to  see  how 
errors  naturally  and  necessarily  arise  in  the  employment  of 
cognitive  faculty  under  the  conditions  of  human  life  and 
human  mental  development.  For  knowledge  is  not  an  affair 
of  presuppositionless  and  "pure"  thinking;  or  of  immediate 
insight  with  a  clarified  and  full-orbed  vision  into  the  inmost 
mysteries  of  Absolute  Being;  or  of  disinterested  and  dis- 
passionate ratiocination  from  indubitable  premises,  along 
clear  and  unobstructed  dialectical  lines,  to  an  absolutely  sure 
and  universal  conclusion.  Only  the  immature  Paracelsus 
dare  say :  — 

"  I  saw  no  cause  why  man 
Should  not  stand  all-sufficient  even  now, 
Or  why  his  annals  should  be  forced  to  tell 
That  once  the  tide  of  light,  about  to  break 
Upon  the  world,  was  sealed  within  its  spring." 

Grown  wiser  and  more  experienced  in  both  truth  and  error, 
the  critic  of  human  faculty  from  the  highest  attainable  point 
of  view  discerns  how  the  case  really  stands  with  man,  —  a 
case  to  be  pleaded,  in  the  interests  neither  of  an  unrea- 
sonable transcendentalism  nor  of  an  equally  unreasonable 
agnosticism. 

"  Power  —  neither  put  forth  blindly,  nor  controlled 
Calmly  by  perfect  knowledge ;  to  be  used 
At  risk,  inspired  or  checked  by  hope  and  fear : 
Knowledge  —  not  intuition,  but  the  slow 
Uncertain  fruit  of  an  enhancing  toil, 
Strengthened  by  love." 


TRUTH  AND  ERROR  457 

As  arising  out  of  the  nature  of  cognitive  faculty  the 
sources  of  error  may  fitly  be  considered  under  two  heads: 
first,  such  as  spring  from  the  inevitable,  natural  limitations 
of  cognitive  faculty ;  and,  second,  such  as  come  from  a  par- 
tially remediable  but  universal  lack  of  energy  and  of  balance 
in  the  use  of  cognitive  faculty.  The  doctrine  of  the  limits  of 
knowledge,  as  it  is  connected  with  the  doctrine  of  degrees  of 
knowledge,  has  already  been  sufficiently  discussed.  But  the 
inherent  weaknesses  of  man's  mind  in  its  efforts  to  attain 
and  to  enlarge  its  system  of  assured  cognitive  judgments,  not 
only  necessarily  result  in  setting  limits  to  his  knowledge, 
but  they  also  inevitably  conduce  to  an  admixture  of  error  in 
these  judgments.  In  saying  this,  we  must  not  be  under- 
stood as  retracting  our  former  contention  that  partial  truth 
is  not  to  be  identified  with  error;  nor  do  we  revoke  the 
more  recent  claim  that  the  variety  of  the  cognitive  judg- 
ments which  different  men  pronounce  respecting  their  most 
immediate  experiences  with  the  Self  and  with  Things  is,  to 
a  large  extent,  an  enlargement  of  the  total  sphere  of  truth 
rather  than  of  error.  But  these  same  limitations  do  also, 
in  some  sort,  commit  the  most  carefully  guarded  and  finely 
trained  minds  to  no  small  amount  of  positive  error.  So 
that  the  complaint  of  being  not  only  bound  to  know  little 
truth,  but  also  destined  to  accept  as  knowledge  much  not- 
truth,  is  by  no  means  without  foundation  in  the  very  nature 
of  the  cognitive  subject.  Here  again,  however,  there  are 
reliefs  to  be  gained  from  taking  the  higher  and  more  com- 
prehensive points  of  view;  from  these  are  discerned  the 
teleology  of  all  knowledge,  and  the  more  fixed  and  important 
relations  between  knowledge  and  what  men  call  "  Reality. " 

The  natural  limitations  of  the  human  mind,  in  respect  of 
each  one  of  those  various  forms  of  functioning  which  com- 
bine in  cognition,  and  in  regard  to  each  kind  of  the  objects 
and  fields  of  cognition,  are  undoubted.  In  the  use  of  all  of 
the  senses  for  the  attainment  of  that  knowledge  of  things 


458  TEUTH  AND  ERROR 

which  comes  in  this  way,  the  more  precise  qualification,  the 
intensity,  the  time-rate,  and  the  field  or  content  possible 
for  one  "  grasp  of  consciousness, "  are  limited.  And  since 
sense-perception  essentially  consists  in  interpretation  of 
sensuous  data  into  terms  of  ideation  and  thought,  misinter- 
pretation may  result  from  any  one  of  the  several  kinds  of 
limitation.  When  the  intensity  of  the  sense-consciousness 
is  stronger  or  weaker  than  a  certain  indefinite  and  variable 
limit,  the  cognitive  judgment  is,  as  we  say,  "  more  or  less 
sure  "  to  be  erroneous.  The  same  thing  is  true  of  the  time- 
rate  of  sense-consciousness;  errors  increase  in  the  cognitive 
judgment  as  this  rate  rises  above  or  falls  below  a  certain 
limit  of  best  results.  Be  as  honest  and  faithful  in  the  use 
of  the  senses  as  one  possibly  can,  one  is  thus  doomed  to 
many  so-called  mistakes.  For  attention  itself,  the  indis- 
pensable condition  of  the  accuracy  of  our  discriminations 
and  of  the  truth  of  our  recognitions  cannot  possibly  be  kept 
at  a  constant  strain.  But  all  men,  to  some  commendable 
degree,  succeed  in  correcting,  or  at  least,  in  making  rough 
but  practically  fruitful  allowances  for  most  such  errors.  In- 
deed, it  is  in  acquiring  just  this  sort  of  skill  that  the  train- 
ing of  the  senses,  and  of  mental  faculty  through  the  senses, 
so  largely  consists.  More  particularly,  the  modern  experi- 
mental study  of  psychology  is  trying  —  and  with  some  suc- 
cess—  to  investigate  these  errors  of  sense,  to  point  out  their 
causes,  and  to  discover  their  laws.  What  has  already  been 
ascertained  shows  that  errors  of  sense  are  not  nearly,  even 
in  the  average  and  untrained  mind,  so  numerous  as  they 
might  be,  if  the  adaptation  of  the  senses  to  the  truth  of  cog- 
nitive judgment  were  less  firm  and  obvious.  For  example, 
there  are  few  more  uncertain  mental  processes  of  the  sensu- 
ous order  than  those  concerned  in  the  localization  of  sound ; 
yet  the  average  person,  when  as  attentive  and  discriminating 
as  he  can  be,  makes  a  relatively  small  percentage  of  serious 
errors ;  and  some  of  the  more  serious  possible  errors  he  never 


TRUTH  AND  ERROR  459 

makes  at  all.  So  that,  if  one  were  at  liberty  to  say  that 
man's  cognitive  faculty,  as  employed  in  the  localization  of 
sounds  by  the  ear,  is  given  to  him  in  order  that  he  may,  by 
a  fair  amount  of  care  and  cultivation,  get  along  well  with 
things  acoustic,  one  would  have  no  reason  greatly  to  blame 
the  author  of  this  faculty. 

The  more  definitively  and  elaborately  intellectual  pro- 
cesses, by  reason  of  these  natural  and  unavoidable  limita- 
tions, lead  the  mind  into  not  a  few  errors.  Because  one 
cannot  think  more  than  so  quickly,  or  so  intensely  and 
clearly,  or  about  more  than  so  many  things,  what  thinking 
one  can  do  when  at  one's  best,  not  infrequently  goes  wrong. 
Memory,  too,  in  its  most  definite  and  trustworthy  manifesta- 
tions, cannot  be  implicitly  relied  upon  to  give  accurately  the 
details  of  our  own  past  experiences  with  ourselves;  and 
when  it  is  summoned  into  the  court  of  self-consciousness  to 
bear  witness  to  the  truth  as  to  past  experiences  with  things, 
the  errors  of  the  original  observations  may  become  more 
important.  In  all  such  matters,  no  clearly  marked  and 
fixed  line  can  be  drawn  between  ordinary  and  scientific 
knowledge.  More  or  less  careful  observation,  and  more  or 
less  careful  thinking,  enter  into  both.  And  into  both  may 
enter  the  errors  resulting  from  the  unavoidable  limitations 
that  hedge  round  all  observation  and  all  inference.  But 
the  presence  of  many  errors,  now  more  or  less  heartily  con- 
fessed and  more  or  less  completely  abandoned,  in  that  body 
of  scientific  knowledge  which  has  been  growing  through  past 
generations,  is  undoubtedly  the  more  impressive  fact  in 
proof  of  the  unavoidableness  of  human  error. 

Indeed,  the  more  complex  forms  of  conceptual  knowledge 
are  peculiarly  liable  to  certain  kinds  of  error.  To  those 
who  justly  value  such  knowledge  highly,  the  temptation  is 
almost  irresistible  to  make  the  clear  and  the  logical  the 
measure  of  the  true.  If  the  advance  line  of  science  did  not 
yield  to  this  temptation,  and  so  constantly  maintain  that 


460  TRUTH  AND  ERROR 

what  the  minds  of  explorers,  unrestrained  by  the  control  of 
other  and  seemingly  contradictory  facts,  think  ought  to  be 
true  is  true  (the  general  postulate  that  Reality  is  throughout 
rational),  then  science  itself  would  not  advance  so  rapidly  as 
it  does  by  the  aid  of  hypothesis  and  of  experimental  testing. 
On  the  other  hand,  in  this  way  the  body  of  accepted  scientific 
truth  is  itself  always  so  constructed  as  to  retain  within 
itself  a  certain  amount  of  material  in  the  form  of  erroneous 
conceptions.  But  in  time,  the  facts  plainly  refuse  to  validate 
many  of  the  most  rational  conceptions ;  and  the  saner  minds, 
first,  and,  finally,  the  multitude  of  the  students  of  the  par- 
ticular science  either  greatly  modify  or  wholly  abandon 
them.  Here,  indeed,  the  error  may  be  said  to  be  —  abstractly 
considered  —  avoidable.  For  it  is  conceivable  that  all  men 
should  hold  the  valid  application  of  as  yet  unproved  hy- 
potheses as  to  the  reality  of  things,  in  a  hypothetical  way. 
A  most  interesting  example  of  this  may  be  seen  in  the  his- 
tory of  the  table  by  which  Mendele'eff  undertook  the  orderly 
and  regular  grouping  of  the  chemical  elements.  This  con- 
jectural arrangement  resulted  in  two  correct  predictions 
which  elements  have  since  appeared  to  observation  to  verify ; 
but  it  also  resulted  in  even  a  larger  number  of  mistakes. 

It  is  often  exceedingly  instructive  to  see  how,  when 
pressed  hard  with  questions  from  the  seeker  after  only 
well-verified  knowledge,  the  most  ardent  advocates  of  favored 
scientific  hypotheses  admit  the  necessary  distinction.  For 
example,  some  years  ago,  in  his  pleased  recognition  of  the 
significance  of  certain  Western  "finds,"  Professor  Huxley 
is  reported  to  have  publicly  proclaimed  the  still  doubtful 
hypothesis  of  biological  evolution  to  be  on  a  par,  for  its 
undoubted  truthfulness,  with  the  law  of  gravitation.  But 
did  this  man  of  science  actually  know,  not  to  say  sincerely 
believe,  just  that  ?  Even  the  law  of  gravitation  is,  so  far  as 
the  greater  number  of  the  physical  masses  in  the  universe 
is  concerned,  itself  still  an  unproved  hypothesis.  In  this 


TRUTH  AND  ERROR  461 

connection  it  may  be  well  to  refer  to  those  indubitable  facts 
of  our  cognition  of  things  in  which  all  confidence  in  even 
the  limited  action  of  human  intellects  as  applied  to  things, 
has  its  foundations:  These  are  sufficiently  summarized  by 
Wundt1  as  (1)  the  independent  variation  of  the  material  and 
the  formal  constituents  of  perception ;  and  (2)  the  constancy 
of  the  general  properties  of  the  formal  constituents.  But 
there  is  ample  reason  to  suppose  that  the  natural  limitations 
of  cognitive  faculty  prevent  us  from  representing,  without 
large  admixture  of  error,  both  the  variable  constituents  and 
the  formal  constants  of  things,  precisely  as  they  really  are 
and  actually  behave. 

At  this  point  there  enters  into  the  doctrine  of  error  another 
important  consideration  which  is  unavoidably  due  to  the 
natural  limitations  of  cognitive  faculty.  We  have  seen 
that  all  positive  and  detailed  knowledge  of  other  objects  than 
the  self-known  Self  is  analogical.  This  would  seem  to 
render  our  alleged  cognitive  judgments  more  sure  and  defen- 
sible within  certain  middle  grounds.  What  is  here  meant 
may  be  illustrated  as  follows :  In  the  cognition  of  one's  Self 
there  is  a  certain  region  where  all  seems  clear  and  undoubted. 
Here  I,  with  a  perfect  assurance,  know  myself  as  I  really 
am.  When  discussing  the  degrees  and  limits  of  knowledge 
(pp.  243  f. )  it  became  perfectly  evident  what  is  this  region  of 
most  clear  and  indubitable  cognition.  But  surrounding  this 
region,  and  separated  from  it  by  no  fixed  and  indelible  lines, 
are  regions  below,  above,  and  on  either  side.  There  blends 
with  this  well-known  life  of  mine  a  being  that  I  know  only 
much  more  indefinitely  and  doubtfully  or  not  at  all;  it  is 
characterized  by  obscure  instincts,  by  animal  impulses,  by 
vague,  inchoate,  and  unmeaning  ideas,  by  unanalyzable  and 
fitful  emotions  and  sentiments.  I  may  speak  of  this  as  the 
"lower  self,"  if  I  choose.  That  of  which  it  is  apparently 
the  analogue  may  be  observed  in  the  lower  animals,  or  in 

1  System  der  Philosophic,  pp.  116  f. 


462  TRUTH  AND  ERROR 

childish  and  savage  human  minds,  or  in  the  subjects  of 
hypnotic  trance,  the  insane,  etc.  Moreover,  when  I  try  to 
understand  the  earlier  developments  of  the  Self  I  call  my 
own,  I  find  my  observations  most  often  baffled,  and  always 
somewhat  sorely  in  doubt  whether  my  own  mental  represen- 
tations correspond  to  the  reality  there.  In  this  lower  region 
of  obscurity  and  confusion,  my  cognitive  faculty  is  likely  to 
be,  on  account  of  its  natural  limitations  of  adaptation  to 
what  appears  as  a  higher  sphere  of  being,  largely  at  fault. 

Again,  above  the  region  of  greatest  clearness  and  certitude 
there  seems  to  be  another  region  of  possible  cognition,  into 
which  I  enter  with  more  or  less  of  confidence  as  borne  thither 
on  the  wings  of  analogy,  but  where  I  am  not  alike  sure  of 
being  free  from  erroneous  conclusions,  —  do  the  best  I  can 
do.  In  my  own  Self  I  find  certain  insights,  anticipations, 
aspirations,  confidences,  and  sublimer  hopes  and  fears,  to 
which  I  give  signification  in  proclaiming  the  cognitive  judg- 
ment: "I  am  something  more  and  higher  than  my  present 
weak  and  erring  human  self."  I,  too,  have  a  divine  Being; 
the  higher  life  of  the  Supreme  Keality  is  actually  present 
and  operative  in  my  life.  This  is,  indeed,  what  I  cannot 
understand  or  make  intelligible  to  others  as  I  can  the  judg- 
ments which  affirm  the  facts  and  laws  of  the  middle  region 
of  my  experience  with  the  Self.  Possibly  —  nay,  probably, 
and  even  assuredly  —  there  is  more  of  not  only  incom- 
pleteness but  of  positive  error  in  the  precise  forms  of  those 
judgments  by  which  concepts  formed  on  the  basis  of  such 
experience  are  united  in  a  totality  of  mental  representation. 

And  now  I  look  wonderingly  toward  the  heavens  and 
listen  to  the  marvellous  tales  of  the  modern  astronomer;  or 
I  peer  through  the  microscope  at  the  indefinitely  small,  and 
hear  the  biologist  discourse  concerning  the  mysteries  of 
bacteriology  or  of  the  physiology  of  plants.  To  the  huge 
masses  overhead  I  ascribe  force,  obedience  to  law,  and  all 
the  equipment  necessary  to  playing  their  part  appropriately 


TRUTH  AND  ERROR  463 

in  the  drama  of  the  universe.  To  the  micro-organisms,  too, 
I  give  an  important  place  in  the  later  acts  of  the  same  great 
drama,  and  speak  boldly  of  their  being  and  their  perform- 
ances in  terms  that  are  meaningless  unless  they  imply  some 
controlling  principle  from  a  sort  of  all-embracing  Life. 
But  it  is  chiefly  when  I  contemplate  the  phenomena  of 
human  development,  the  ethical,  political,  social,  and  re- 
ligious evolution  of  mankind,  that  I  feel  the  impulse  and 
the  need  to  construct  my  conception  of  Reality,  as  a  whole, 
in  terms  to  satisfy  this  higher  Self  of  my  own.  Let  it  be 
noticed,  however,  that,  on  the  one  hand,  I  am  always  bound 
in  the  interests  of  clear  thinking  to  make  this  construction 
with  a  consciousness  of  an  increasing  danger  of  error  as  I 
get  further  away  —  using  the  same  principle  of  analogy  — 
from  the  clear,  middle  regions  of  my  own  experience  as  a 
Self.  But,  on  the  other  hand,  I  am  at  no  time  really  for- 
saking the  guidance  of  thought  or  making  a  blind  rush  into 
the  by-paths  of  an  irrational  faith.  I  am  simply  extending 
the  one  principle  of  all  cognition  into  regions  which,  while 
they  are  never  to  be  separated  by  a  fixed  and  unalterable 
barrier  from  those  of  our  most  assured  cognitions,  are, 
nevertheless,  regions  where  the  principle  must  be  more 
doubtfully  applied. 

This,  however,  is  itself  a  conclusion  derived  chiefly  from 
the  more  purely  intellectual  considerations  that  bear  upon  it. 
There  is  need  that  it  should  be  supplemented  and  possibly 
modified  by  considerations  derived  from  the  doctrine  that 
all  knowledge,  judged  from  the  point  of  view  of  its  worth, 
is  teleological ;  and  that  ethical  and  aesthetical  "momenta" 
enter  into  all  the  higher  foriris  of  knowledge. 

The  metaphysical  factors,  or  ontological  functionings  of 
mind  in  cognition,  are  natural  sources  of  error.  This  is, 
of  course,  true  only  when  these  factors  are  themselves 
required  or  allowed  to  take  part  in  that  cognitive  judgment 
whose  truth  or  falsity  is  under  consideration.  All  truth  — 


464  TRUTH  AND  ERROR 

such  is  the  nature  of  cognition  —  flows  from  a  sort  of  trans- 
subjective  compulsion;  but  we  do  not  satisfactorily  account 
for  this  compulsion  when  we  follow  Kant  in  ascribing  it 
solely  to  the  constitutional  forms  of  the  functioning  of 
our  own  intellect.  The  rather  is  it  also  a  necessity  which 
has  its  source  in  the  nature  of  eatfra-mental  Reality. 
When,  however,  the  attempt  is  made  more  carefully  to  define 
the  character  and  the  extent  of  this  necessity,  and  to 
describe  the  laws  or  universal  forms  of  its  operation,  we 
enter  the  realm  where  error  is  almost  certain  to  mingle 
with  truth.  Some  of  such  error,  too,  is  due  to  the  natural 
and  unavoidable  limitations  of  human  cognitive  faculty. 
For  it  is  not  possible  by  thinking  alone,  to  know  completely 
the  grounds  of  one's  own  being,  or  to  put  into  incontro- 
vertible form,  for  knowledge,  the  laws  which  we  actually 
follow  in  our  cognitive  commerce  with  the  real  being  and 
actual  transactions  of  things.  We  are  here  —  in  the  em- 
brace of  Reality !  But  how  we  got  here,  no  man  may  be  able 
to  tell ;  and  in  the  attempt  to  tell,  one  is  quite  sure  to  com- 
mit not  a  few  errors.  Indeed,  not  a  bad  case  might  be  made 
out  for  the  apparently  paradoxical  statement  that  in  those 
subjects  which  seem  simplest  and  clearest  to  all  men,  most 
error  is  likely  to  be  committed  in  every  attempt  to  give  to 
vague  impressions  the  form  of  assured  cognitive  judgments. 
What  other  books  have  ever  been  written  that  contained 
so  much  which  would  not  stand  the  test  of  the  truth  of 
Reality,  as  books  on  formal  logic  or  demonstrative  systems 
of  general  metaphysics  ?  In  the  course  of  this  treatise,  we 
have  had  occasion  to  show  how  erroneous,  in  reality,  are 
current  conceptions  regarding  the  principle  of  identity,  the 
principle  of  sufficient  reason,  the  essential  nature  of  things, 
the  principle  of  causation,  etc.,  etc.1 

1  According  to  Caspar!  (Grundprobleme  der  Erkenntnissthatigkeit,  i.,pp.  156f.) 
three  pseudo-concepts  result  from  "overdriven"  individualizing:  (1)  the  X  of 
the  Democritean  concept  of  absolutely  empty  Space ;  (2)  the  Xot  the  Leibnitzean 
"  Pre-established  Harmony ; "  and  (3)  the  X  of  the  Herbartian  "  quiescent  Cau- 


TRUTH  AND  ERROR  465 

In  the  development  and  use  of  cognitive  faculty,  the 
judgments  made  may  approach  ever  nearer  to,  and  may 
finally  become,  a  species  of  conduct.  Thus  some  judgments 
are  held  to  be,  like  every  species  of  conduct,  not  simply  cor- 
rect or  erroneous,  but  also  commendable  or  blameworthy. 
For  in  the  thought  and  practice  of  men,  the  possession  of  the 
power  to  know  carries  with  it  an  obligation,  under  the 
recognized  natural  limitations  from  which  no  man  can 
escape,  to  make  our  judgments  true  and  not  false.  From 
this  point  of  view  also,  actual  errors  are  graded,  in  a  rough 
way,  from  those  into  which  the  wisest  man  might  be  almost 
completely  excused  for  falling,  down  to  the  most  inexcusable 
and  blameworthy  of  falsehoods  and  lies.  Here  ethics  joins 
hands  with  psychology  and  logic  for  the  execution  of  a  work 
•in  which  all  have  a  common  interest,  —  namely,  the  purifica- 
tion of  judgment.  But  epistemological  theory  explains  all 
such  errors  sufficiently  for  its  purposes  by  simply  pointing 
out  that  they  may  be  ascribed  in  general  to  the  unbalanced 
action  of  those  different  forms  of  functioning  which  are 
combined  in  the  formation  of  every  judgment.  This  view 
scarcely  needs  more  than  a  single  illustration  or  two. 
Thus  in  the  use  of  the  senses,  under  the  control  of  will, 
undue  haste  may  lead  to  the  formation  of  judgment  on 
insufficient  data;  but  undue  sloth  and  tardiness  of  movement 
in  the  Blickpunkt  of  attention  may  cause  a  similar  erroneous 
result.  Lack  of  emotional  interest  may  at  one  time  be  a 
source  of  errors  similar  to  those  for  which  excess  of  emo- 
tional interest,  at  other  time,  accounts.  In  the  expressly 
guarded  and  more  refined  observations  of  the  physical  and 

sality."  As  pseudo-concepts  arising  from  excessive  generalizing,  he  instances  the 
"  mathematical  Indeterminate,"  the  "  Ahsolute  "  —  whether  as  Dinrj-an-Sich,  Ab- 
solute Idea  (Hegel),  Will  to  Live  (Schopenhauer),  or  "  the  Unconscious  "  (Hart- 
inaiiii.)  The  source  of  about  all  metaphysical  error  is  the  attempt  to  explain 
light  out  of  darkness.  Thus  we  have  Stoff-an-slch  in  one  place  and  Form-an-sich 
in  another.  (This,  we  remark,  is  the  really  delusive  dualism,  and  not  that  of  our 
concrete  experience,  as  it  actually  exists  between  mind  and  body.) 

30 


466  TRUTH  AND  ERROR 

natural  sciences,  judgment  takes  up  into  itself  the  charac- 
teristics of  the  affective  tendencies  and  forms  of  bias 
belonging  to  the  investigator.  The  investigations  of  the 
psychological  laboratory  confirm  what  the  most  obvious 
experiences  lead  us  to  suspect ;  hour  by  hour,  and  respecting 
the  simplest  and  plainest  of  matters,  men  judge  wrong 
under  a  great  variety  of  not  wholly  unavoidable  influences. 
Thus  the  shrewd  observer  is  always  on  his  guard  against 
being  deceived  by  his  own  changing  emotional  tendencies, 
as  well  as  by  his  more  settled  habits  of  conviction,  and  by 
the  lower  but  always  pervasive  physiological  and  physical 
conditions.  But  this  very  shrewdness,  when  itself  exces- 
sive and  full  of  natural  suspiciousness,  has  prevented  many 
a  man  from  knowing  in  a  satisfactory  way  much  of  which 
he  would  most  gladly  have  been  assured.  Indeed,  the  higher 
wisdom  often  leads  one  not  to  be  too  nice  about  details,  lest 
one  commit  the  graver  error  of  misjudging  or  neglecting 
the  important  matters.  And  just  as  we  are  congratulat- 
ing ourselves  that  we  have  thus  escaped  mistakes  and  have 
gained  a  firmer  and  more  comprehensive  grasp  upon  the 
truth  of  reality,  we  find  some  seemingly  trivial  oversight 
has  revenged  itself  by  convicting  of  error  our  entire  care- 
fully prepared  case.  Neglected  trifles  have  succeeded  in 
throwing  many  a  scientific  brief  out  of  the  highest  court  of 
appeal. 

It  is  with  such  experiences  in  mind  that  men  often  most 
eagerly  and  hopefully  inquire  after  some  universal  Criterion 
of  Truth.  Surely,  they  think,  the  Spirit  of  all  veracity 
should  have  provided  them  with  a  conclusive  standard,  a 
general  infallible  judgment  regarding  the  necessary  and 
universal  characteristics  of  all  valid  cognition.  If  this  can 
only  be  discovered  and  carefully  applied,  it  will  preserve 
them  from  every  error.  But  a  more  seductive  will-o'-the- 
wisp  than  this  was  never  proposed.  There  is  no  single, 
infallible  means  of  testing  truth  —  known,  conceivable,  or 


TRUTH  AND  ERROR  467 

possible.  If  a  criterion  of  truth  were  discovered,  we  should 
indeed  have  all  honest  souls  paying  any  price  of  industry 
and  self-renunciation  to  possess  so  great  a  treasure.  But 
the  very  nature  of  truth  as  dependent  upon  the  characteris- 
tics of  the  cognitive  judgment  is  such  as  to  render  absurd 
the  conception  of  a  single  and  universally  applicable  crite- 
rion. The  nearest  approach  one  can  make  to  the  bare 
conception  of  such  a  criterion  of  truth  is  that  evidence 
which  is  found  in  our  clearest,  most  feeling-full  and  content- 
full,  voluntary  self-consciousness.  But  the  attempt  to  apply 
such  a  criterion  to  all  human  cognitive  judgments  would 
defeat  itself  in  a  most  annoying,  or  amusing,  or  disastrous 
way.  The  very  attempt  would  render  all  growth  in  knowl- 
edge impossible;  it  would  bring  upon  one  the  charge  of  a 
ridiculous  and  monstrous  egoism,  and  would  prove  quite 
impotent  to  tell  one  anything  worth  knowing  about  the  real 
being  and  actual  transactions  of  things.  Moreover,  the 
mind  that  demands  such  a  criterion  needs  to  be  brought,  in 
no  gentle  fashion,  up  against  the  chastening  reminders  that 
life  consists  in  something  more  and  other  than  sitting  down 
to  test  judgments  by  a  cunningly  devised  scale  of  absolute 
values.  Better  be  happy  and  effective  in  action  that  is  full 
of  intellectual  blunders,  than  be  miserable  and  inactive 
through  the  effort  to  conform  the  intellect  to  so  machine- 
like  measurements. 

Criteria  for  testing,  in  a  more  or  less  satisfactory  way, 
the  various  kinds  of  judgments  which  their  makers  esteem 
cognitive,  are  not  wanting,  however.  They  are  as  abundant 
as  are  the  different  main  forms  of  corrective  discipline 
which  human  life  affords  for  all  who  share  in  it.  The 
whole  course  of  infantile  development  consists  in  getting  the 
understanding  and  application  of  these  criteria  better  in 
hand.  The  practical  test  of  the  child's  early  judgment  that 
the  lighted  candle  or  burning  coal  is  a  species  of  good,  to 
be  made  further  acquainted  with  by  taste  and  touch,  is  the 


468  TRUTH  AND  ERROR 

experience  which  follows  the  effort  to  set  that  judgment 
into  realization.  Of  all  the  so-called  criteria  of  the  false- 
ness or  truth  of  judgments,  such  practical  tests,  if  obtain- 
able, are  most  valuable.  So  that  there  is  really  no  demand 
made  which  is  out  of  the  natural  order  when  alleged  truths 
of  politics,  ethics,  or  religion  are  recommended  to  a  similar 
criterion.  The  well-known  tests  of  scientific  hypothesis 
and  induction  are  not,  in  principle,  markedly  different. 
All  criteria  are  included  in  the  persistent  effort  of  the  indi- 
vidual and  of  the  race  to  arrive  at  an  harmonious  and  satis- 
factory experience.  Such  an  experience  necessarily  includes 
all  that  can  be  gained,  by  growth  of  knowledge,  toward  an 
harmonious  and  satisfactory  explanation  of  experience. 
But,  as  we  have  already  seen,  experience  is  much  larger 
than  cognition.  And  the  sphere  of  cognition  is  larger  than 
the  sphere  of  judgment,  even  when  the  judgments  are  estab- 
lished by  proof  most  satisfactory  to  the  intellect.  Knowl- 
edge itself  is  a  vital  body,  a  vital  growth. 

When,  then,  any  particular  alleged  cognitive  judgment 
is  pronounced,  it  appears  in  consciousness,  by  virtue  of  its 
very  claim  to  be  cognitive,  as  the  solution  of  some  problem 
respecting  the  real  being  and  actual  transactions  of  things. 
It  carries  within  itself,  for  the  mind  pronouncing  it,  a 
demand  for  the  acceptance  ("  Belief  ")  either  of  some  object 
of  sense-intuition  so-called,  as  a  really  existent  other  "  not- 
me,"  or  of  some  truth  about  objects,  regarded  by  the  mind 
as  resting  on  such  or  such  grounds.  It  is  this  "  reference 
for  proof  (in  the  wider  and  looser  meaning  of  the  word)  to  a 
somewhat  separate  from  us,  and  not  possessed  by  us,  which 
gives  their  peculiar  significance  to  the  expressions  of  cer- 
tainty and  logical  compulsion. " l  Thus  the  criteria  of  the 
first  order  for  the  testing  of  the  truth  of  every  cognitive 
judgment  are  properly  thought  of  as  an  integral  part  of  the 
judgment  itself. 

1  See  Volkelt,  Erfahrung  und  Denken,  p.  283. 


TRUTH  AND  ERROR  469 

Any  cognitive  judgment  may,  however,  have  its  truth 
challenged  and  the  further  demand  made  that  it  shall  submit 
itself  to  a  process  of  critical  examination  or  testing.  This 
demand  may  arise  from  within  the  judging  mind,  and  thus 
constitute  a  proposal  to  apply  the  criteria  furnished  by 
other  outlying  factors  of  the  individual's  experience;  or  it 
may  arise  from  without  and  because  the  alleged  cognitive 
judgment  is  not  found  harmonious  and  satisfactory  to  other 
judging  minds.  In  either  case  the  pronouncing  of  the  judg- 
ment is  held  suspended,  as  it  were,  until  this  particular 
alleged  cognitive  factor  in  the  sum  of  experience  can  be 
submitted  to  a  process  of  testing.  Here  not  only  will  other 
judgments,  more  or  less  firmly  established  and  built  into 
the  very  texture  of  the  mind,  exercise  their  influence  under 
the  general  demand  for  a  conscious  intellectual  harmony, 
but  also  will  the  emotional  prepossessions  and  voluntary 
tendencies  of  the  individual  mind  contribute  their  share  to 
the  process.  Nothing  is  more  instructive  on  this  subject 
than  to  notice  how  men,  as  an  obvious  matter-of-fact,  apply 
tests  to  those  new  forms  of  judging  truth  which  disturb  the 
harmony  of  their  mental  life.  In  the  last  resort,  no  crite- 
rion lies  further  back  or  lower  down  than  this  same  sense  of 
harmony.  But  alas !  there  are  few  minds,  indeed,  which 
succeed  in  bringing  into  such  an  harmonious  and  satisfac- 
tory condition  the  various  items  of  truth  which  their  total 
experience  seems  to  present. 

In  the  larger  life  of  the  race  the  testing  of  truth,  for  the 
elimination  of  error  and  the  confirmation  of  the  truth  itself, 
goes  on  through  the  ages  in  essentially  the  same  way.  Only 
here  there  is  no  wider  and  more  inclusive  experience  to 
which  the  individual  minds  of  any  age  may  make  their  final 
and  most  convincing  appeal.  For,  even  if  one  admit  the 
fullest  reasonable  claims  that  can  be  made  in  the  behalf  of 
revelations  of  truth  that  break  in  upon  the  race  from  the 
Source  of  all  Truth,  these  revelations  themselves  can  ulti- 


470  TRUTH  AND  ERROR 

mately  get  accepted  only  as  they  are  able  to  submit  to  essen- 
tially the  same  criteria;  and  being  accepted,  completely  or 
partially,  they  become  integral  parts  of  that  experience  of 
the  race  which  is  itself  the  ultimate  test.  But  to  admit 
this  statement  is  a  very  different  thing  from  accepting  the 
tenets  of  either  the  current  empiricism  or  the  old-fashioned 
rationalism.  The  depth  and  height  and  breadth  of  this 
difference  can  be  appreciated  only  by  recalling  all  that  has 
already  been  said  concerning  the  transcendent  in  human 
experience,  and  concerning  the  wealth  of  assured  content 
which  belongs  to  human  knowledge,  beyond  anything  that 
mere  ratiocination  can  supply. 

It  appears,  then,  that  there  is  no  cause  for  overweening 
confidence  in  man's  cognitive  powers  to  afford  insight  into 
the  complete  interior  nature  of  Reality,  as  it  were ;  but  even 
less  cause  for  despairing  of  all  knowledge  and  for  resorting 
to  either  a  sceptical  or  a  dogmatic  doctrine  of  universal 
nescience.  The  plain  man's  consciousness,  in  his  simple 
work-a-day  transactions  with  things  and  observations  of  him- 
self, cannot  set  itself  up  as  the  measure  of  all  the  truths 
of  science  and  philosophy.  It  affords  no  so  very  penetrat- 
ing insight  into  the  real  nature  of  things,  and  no  systematic 
and  well-reasoned  cognition  of  Self.  But  it  has  in  it  the 
everlasting  truth  of  the  Ego's  self-active  Life ;  and  it  enables 
its  possessor  to  make  his  own  the  ancient  mystic  saying  of 
India,  "That  too  art  thou. "  The  feeling  of  the  unity  in 
difference  of  the  Self,  and  also  of  its  oneness  with  the 
World,  are  present  as  the  abiding  truth  of  all  such  knowl- 
edge. "  Cock-sure  "  science  and  arrogant  philosophy,  claim- 
ing either  a  perfect  immediate  insight  or  an  irresistible 
apodictic,  cannot  vindicate  themselves  in  the  presence 
of  a  correct  doctrine  of  human  cognitive  faculty;  they 
contradict  the  experience  of  the  race  with  both  truth  and 
error.  But  he  who  brings  against  science  and  philosophy 
the  railing  accusation  which  Milton  more  fitly  brought 


TRUTH  AND  ERROR  471 

against  the  makers  of  civil  law,  that  they  are  perpetu- 
ally "hatching  lies  with  the  heat  of  jurisdiction,"  can- 
not speak  the  few  words  of  his  accusation  without 
implying  an  excessive  confidence  in  his  own  science  and 
philosophy. 


CHAPTER  XVI 

THE  TELEOLOGY  OF  KNOWLEDGE 

OUR  critical  examination  of  the  epistemological  problem 
has  constantly  brought  us  nearer  to  the  place  where 
it  seems  to  merge  itself  with,  and  be  lost  in,  the  larger  prob- 
lems of  all  human  life  in  its  relations  to  Reality.  And, 
indeed,  what  is  more  obvious  than  that  knowledge  cannot  be 
considered  as  a  phenomenon  separable  from  the  entire  com- 
plex existence  and  development  of  the  race  ?  It  cannot  be 
explained  as  a  kind  of  mechanical  combination  resulting  from 
the  fusion,  under  predetermined  forms,  of  merely  sensational 
and  ideational  factors  in  the  individual  consciousness.  Other 
theories  of  cognition,  too,  which,  like  that  of  Kant,  include  an 
enormous  amount  of  the  purely  formal  a  priori,  but  fail  to 
admit  the  affective  and  voluntary  aspects  of  the  mind's  life  to 
a  share  in  the  cognitive  attitude  toward  reality,  are  surely 
destined  to  show  this  original  deficiency,  either  by  theoretical 
inconsistencies  and  contradictions  or  by  failing  to  afford  a 
practical  and  ethical  satisfaction.  Men  must  live,  and  strive, 
and  die,  in  the  use  of  their  minds.  And  to  put  the  case  in 
a  superficial  and  popular  but  expressive  way  :  If  our  mental 
faculties  are  not  "  made  to  live  and  die  by,"  to  guide  us  in 
our  striving  after  every  manner  of  truth,  then  either  so- 
called  knowledge,  or  the  larger  conceptions  which  we  desig- 
nate by  Life  and  Reality,  are  vain  and  illusory.  For  the 
cognitions  which  men  have,  or  think  they  have,  and  ever 
strive  to  get,  they  insist  shall  serve  some  purpose  in  relation 
to  the  higher  and  more  comprehensive  good. 


THE  TELEOLOGY  OF  KNOWLEDGE  473 

In  brief,  all  inevitably  regard  their  own  cognitive  faculties 
from  the  teleological  point  of  view.  In  the  higher  realms  of 
ethics,  art,  and  religion,  men  are  generally  prompt  enough  to 
ask,  "  What  is  the  use  of  trying  to  know  ?  "  How,  then,  can 
the  student  of  pure  science  or  of  philosophy  regard  the  teleo- 
logical question  when  applied  to  his  own  favorite  studies  as 
unmeaning  or  impertinent  ? 

And,  indeed,  the  question  of  use,  the  attempt  to  bring 
knowledge  itself  under  the  conception  of  worth,  is  never 
unmeaning  or  impertinent.  For  every  individual  cognition, 
as  well  as  the  entire  body  of  human  knowledge,  not  only  may 
but  must  be  regarded  from  the  teleological  point  of  view. 
The  very  structure  of  cognitive  faculty  is  subject  to  the 
idea  of  final  purpose ;  and  if  knowledge  is  to  be  validated 
as  a  mental  representation  of  the  real  being  and  actual 
transactions  of  things,  then  the  idea  of  final  purpose  must 
somehow  find  its  place  in  Reality,  so  far  as  known  or  know- 
able  to  man.  Now,  as  to  the  illustration  of  the  teleological 
idea  in  the  very  nature  and  development  of  all  human  cogni- 
tion, there  can  be  no  doubt ;  for  the  facts  and  data  for  analy- 
sis exist  where  they  can  be  approached  and  studied.  But 
as  to  any  corresponding  application  of  the  same  idea  to 
eatfra-mental  Reality,  our  way  of  approach  is  over  the  bridge 
of  that  same  analogical  postulate,  which  has  been  found 
necessary  to  give  validity  to  all  knowledge  "  as  to  what " 
things  really  are.  The  necessity  of  escape  from  that  ex- 
treme of  sceptical  idealism  or  agnosticism  which  has  been 
found  intrinsically  absurd  is,  however,  just  as  great  in  this 
case  as  in  the  case  of  any  other  form  of  the  inquiry  after  the 
validity  of  human  knowledge. 

The  nature  of  human  knowledge,  as  revealed  especially  by 
a  study  of  its  origins  and  earlier  developments,  shows  the 
indispensable  part  which  action  takes  in  the  first  apprehen- 
sion  of  things.  Only  as"~t5e  ~cnild  does  somewhat  to  things, 
and  has  somewhat  done  to  him  by  things,  can  he  come  to 


474  THE  TELEOLOGY  OF  KNOWLEDGE 


f.hni.  f.hpy  g,rP)  ^  what  they  are.  Genetic  psychology 
places  this  beyond  doubt.  It  is  matter  of  universal_obsej^a=- 
tionjjiat  the  inactive  child  is  backward  in  his  apprehension 
of  concrete  physical  ob]e^ts~7--atid--thrairtlie  "  dreamy  "  man  is 
most  apt  to  doubt  the  real  existence  of  such  objects,  as  well 
as  least  aware  of  how  they  are  to  be  handled  in  order  to  "  get 
the  good  of  them."  It  J8_action_that^  moving  along  organic 
lines  in  the  pursuit  of  ends,  secures  growth  of  positive  cognition 
and  banishes  doubt.  For,  as  has  just  been  indicated,  action, 
as  soon  as  it  becomes  conscious  volition  guided  by  ideas,  is 
teleological  in  its  attitude  toward  the  objects  of  sense.  In 
the  attempt  to  use  anything,  the  child  gains  new  knowledge 
of  that  thing;  and  the  success  or  failure  of  his  attempt, 
starting  from  the  advanced  cognitive  point  of  view  already 
gainedjjs_a^stimulus  to  the~strile  after  yelTmore  knowledge 
about  the  same  thing.  Thus  does  knowledge  grow  by  use,  in 
order  to  the  end  of  improved  and  larger  use. 

From  the  point  of  view  of  psychological  analysis,  every 
mental  event  of  a  developed  order-appears  as  an  illustration 
of  the  idea  of  final  ^purpose!  ThTs^is  the  scientific  truth 
which  leads  to  the  epistemological  position  :  No  cognition  can 
be  considered  as  the  mere  equivalent  of  its  psychic  factors  or 
psycho-physical  causes.  As  Wundt  1  has  said,  even  quanti- 
tatively considered,  every  spiritual  event  surpasses  its  causes. 
Perceptions,  regarded  as  mental  constructs  out  of  composite 
psychical  factors,  can  never  be  explained  by,  or  deduced 
from,  their  sensational  and  ideational  elements.  But,  on  the 
contrary,  when  we  begin  by  considering  what  they  are  as  con- 
cerned with  the  appropriation  of  things  to  our  uses,  and  with 
the  adjustment  of  all  our  changing  relations  to  reality  so  as 
to  live,  and  to  live  more  abundantly,  both  as  individuals  and 

1  So  enthalt  ein  r&umliches  Bild  ausser  den  Empfindungsqiialitaten,  die  in  dasselbe 
eingefien,  die  specifische  Qualitat  des  Rdumlichen,  und  diese  Qualitdt  Juhrt  exten- 
sive Massbeziehungen  mit  sick,  welche  zu  den  intensiven  GrSssen  der  Empfindungen 
hinzukommen.  —  System  der  Philosophic,  p.  345. 


THE  TELEOLOGY   OF  KNOWLEDGE  475 

as  a  race,  the  completed  perceptions,  in  the  light  of  final  pur- 
pose, impart  a  new  meaning  to  their  own  sensational  and 
ideational  elements.  If,  from  the  more  mechanical  point  of 
view,  psychology  is  warranted  in  describing  the  perceptions 
as  what  they  are,  because  of  the  sensations  and  images  of 
sensations  which  enter  into  them,  and  even  in  maintaining 
that  perceptions  exist  at  all  only  as  the  sensational  and  idea- 
tional basis  is  laid  in  the  psycho-physical  mechanism,  still  from 
the  teleological  point  of  view,  episteinology  also  is  warranted  in 
holding  that  the  active  mind,  in  order  to  secure  its  own  good, 
has  selected  and  combined  these  particular  elements  into  the 
totality  of  the  perceptive  construct. 

Only  as  the  full  force  of  the  teleological  principle  is  admit- 
ted, can  the  fact  be  satisfactorily  explained  that  percepts  of  the 
same  things  by  different  minds  are  so  different.  On  this  point 
it  would  better  accord  with  a  true  doctrine  of  knowledge  to 
say  that  only  the  teleological  view  of  all  perception  by  the 
senses  shows  us  why  things  are  so  different  as  they  are  known 
by  different  cognitive  subjects.  Fo.r_eyery  man  is  forced  to 
knowjhings  according  to  his  capacity-for  receiving  impres- 
sions and  retaining  and  reviving  ideas :  font-  pypry  mnn  njsr>_ 
consciously  strives  to  know  things  accardJng  to  tha  rp1n.fi  rmsj_ 
in  which  they  seem  to  him  to  stand  to  his  own_j)ur poses^or 
ajitaining  a  good^  Things  impress  one  according  to  one's  sen- 
suous and  ideating  faculty ;  but  one  also  knows  them  for 
what  they  seem  worth  to  one  in  the  carrying  out  of  one's  ends. 
To  the  man  who  cares  to  know  nothing  further,  a  Stradi- 
varius  is  "no  thing"  but  a  fiddle.  To  the  modern  violin- 
maker  it  appears  a  model  replete  with  lessons  as  to  the 
selection  and  disposition  of  various  materials,  the  shaping 
and  combining  of  parts,  the  soundness  and  texture  of  belly, 
back,  and  bridge,  the  curvature  of  sides,  etc.  But  to  its  art- 
ist owner  it  is  an  instrument  of  his  musical  ideas  and  feelings, 
—  an  instrument,  and  something  much  more ;  it  is  a  tried 
and  sympathetic  servant,  a  beloved  and  comforting  compan- 


476  THE  TELEOLOGY  OF  KNOWLEDGE 

ion.  To  the  mind's  eye  of  the  physicist,  however,  it  appears 
as  a  collection  of  molecules  and  atoms  whose  acoustic  prop- 
erties come  under  the  laws  of  his  science ;  or  whose  wonder- 
ful performances  may  furnish  new  problems  to  that  science. 
But  which  of  these  —  and  if  none  of  these,  what  —  is  the 
real  violin  ?  The  very  question,  in  connection  with  the  expe- 
rience out  of  which  it  arises,  shows  that  all  perceptive  cog- 
nition of  things  is  teleological ;  for  perceptions  themselves  are 
mental  constructs  depending  upon  the  selective  action  of  will 
as  guided  by  ideas  in  the  conscious  pursuit  of  some  end. 

The  same  truth  may  be  maintained  with  reference  to  the 
construction  and  development  of  those  abstract  mental  pic- 
tures which,  speaking  from  the  psychological  point  of  view, 
constitute  our  means  for  the  classification  and  recognition  of 
things.  The  schemata,  or  general  images  of  sensuous  objects, 
are  mental  constructs  whose  very  nature  embodies  and  illus- 
trates the  principle  of  final  purpose.  Men's  perceptions  of 
things  differ,  according  to  the  selective  action  of  will  in  pur- 
suit of  ends  ;  but  their  ideas  of  things  differ  in  the  same  way 
more  abundantly.  One's  mental  image  of  a  thing  cannot 
contain  sensational  elements  of  which  no  sensuous  experience 
has  ever  been  given  ;  but  one's  mental  image  of  any  class  of 
things  is  even  more  dependent  upon  what  one  wants  of  those 
things ;  that  is,  upon  one's  perceptions.  What  is  called  a  con- 
cept must  be  regarded  as  a  mental  construct  ruled  over  by  the 
principle  of  final  purpose.  It  is  described  by  logicians  as  a 
complex  of  marks  that  have  been  abstracted  from  a  num- 
ber of  objects  and  combined  into  a  totality  which  is  valid 
for  application  to  any  one  of  those  objects  in  as  far  as  it 
belongs  to  the  class.  The  concept  of  a  "  man  "  will  tell  you 
what  X  is,  as  a  man,  simply  ;  but  it  will  tell  you  nothing  as 
to  "  what  sort  of  a  man "  he  is ;  in  order  to  know  that,  you 
must  know  X. 

But  I  am  no  more  set  free  from  the  rule  of  the  teleological 
idea  when  I  fall  back  upon  the  general  conception  of  man, 


THE  TELEOLOGY    OF  KNOWLEDGE  477 

and  agree  with  myself  not  to  take  the  trouble  to  know  X  in 
particular,  than  I  am  when,  equipped  with  this  concept,  as  it 
were,  I  deliberately  enter  upon  a  "  plan-full "  course  of  proced- 
ure having  for  its  conscious  purpose  the  detailed  acquaintance 
with  this  individual.  For  I  may  be  forced  at  once  to  raise 
and  answer  the  question :  With  what  end  in  view  have  you 
formed  your  conception  of  a  man  ?  And  to  which  one  of  the 
many  possible  sorts  does  this  conception  of  yours  answer  ?  Is 
it  the  mere  exterior  semblance  of  an  erect  biped  man  ;  or  the 
man  scientifically  defined  from  the  point  of  view  of  biology 
and  anthropology ;  or  the  business  man's  man,  with  whom 
one  may  barter,  and  whom  one  may  estimate,  for  purposes  of 
trust,  by  referring  to  the  lists  of  some  Commercial  Agency  ? 
Is  it  the  man  as  he  constitutes  a  possible  constituent  of  some 
domestic  or  social  combination ;  or  man  with  an  immortal 
soul  to  save  or  lose,  according  to  the  theologian's  point  of 
view  ?  In  any  and  every  case  it  will  appear  that  t he  concept 
must  be  regarded  as  a  construct  which  has  been  framed  from 
elements  more  or  less  consciously  selected  with  particular  ends 
in  view.  Its  so-called  "  general "  character  is,  indeed,  sup- 
posed to  be  framed  after  the  pattern  of  certain  extra-mentally 
existent  characteristics  of  a  similar  kind  possessed  by  a  num- 
ber of  individuals.  And  from  this  metaphysical  point  of  view, 
the  concept  appears  causally  determined,  irrespective  of  any 
use  to  which  it  may  be  put  by  a  conceiving  mind.  But  from 
the  intra-mental,  or  rather  the  psychologico-social  point  of 
view,  the  truth  appears,  that  all  men  want  certain  ends  to  be 
served  for  them  by  their  fellows ;  therefore,  they  agree  in 
forming  a  so-called  general  concept  of  "  Man,"  which  may  be 
regarded  as  established  and  made  compulsory  in  its  accept- 
ance, quite  irrespective  of  individual  ends.  Even  this  restric- 
tion to  the  limits  of  the  control  exercised  by  the  teleological 
principle  in  its  application  to  the  conceptions  of  the  race  is 
only  apparent.  Indeed,  the  restriction  itself  illustrates  the 
truth  of  teleology.  For  one  finds  one's  self  compelled  to  clas- 


478  THE  TELEOLOGY  OF  KNOWLEDGE 

sify  men  as  both  knowers  and  known,  according  as  they  have 
it  in  mind  to  be  scientific,  or  commercial,  or  social,  or  reli- 
gious, etc.  And  if  one  thinker  feels  bound  to  know  no  man 
after  the  spirit,  but  only  after  the  flesh,  others  may  side  with 
the  Apostle  and  declare  :  "  Wherefore  henceforth  know  we  no 
man  after  the  flesh."  In  which  case  it  does  not  seem  to  be 
determinable  a  priori  that  one  point  of  view  will  be  any  more 
arbitrary  or  unproductive  of  genuine  knowledge  than  the 
other.  The  question  may  still  be  raised:  Which  is  the  real 
man  to  whom  the  true  concept  rightly  applies  ? 

In  fact,  however,  both  psychological  and  philosophical 
study  of  the  nature  of  cognitive  judgment  has  shown  that 
neither  perceptions  nor  conceptions  can  be  understood  as 
mental  entities  which  exist  in  some  sort  of  separateness  from 
reality.  For  it  is  this  judgment  which  creates  them  both ;  it  is 
cognitive  judgment  which  makes  any  of  our  psychoses  capable 
of  being  brought  to  a  standard  and  pronounced  either  false  or 
true.  It  is  continuity  in  the  growth  of  the  faculty  of  forming 
such  judgments  —  more  clearly,  with  richer  content,  with 
firmer  and  more  unassailable  reasons  and  corresponding  con- 
victions, under  the  control  of  developed  will  and  in  the  ser- 
vice of  higher  and  purer  emotions  —  that  binds  together  into 
a  spiritual  unity  the  entire  life  of  the  soul.  Such  judgments, 
however,  always  affirm  some  sort  of  relations  as  existent  in 
reality.  These  relations,  as  the  judgments  affirming  them 
become  connected  together  into  so-called  chains  of  reasoning, 
are  thought  of  as  connections  which  actually  exist  between 
the  different  real  beings  and  actual  transactions  of  the  world. 
Thus  the  connections  themselves  become  a  problem  for  the 
thought  of  man  to  solve ;  and  in  solving  this  problem  it  is 
necessary  to  consider  them  not  merely  as  falling  under  the 
principle  of  sufficient  reason,  but  also  as  subject  to  the  idea  of 
final  purpose.  This  teleological  necessity  arises  from  the  very 
nature  of  thought  as  leading  up  to  the  terminal  judgment  of 
cognition.  Indeed,  both  the  principles  of  sufficient  reason 


THE  TELEOLOGY  OF  KNOWLEDGE  479 

and  of  final  purpose  originate  in  the  same  root  of  experience, 
—  namely,  in  the  consciousness  of  a  Self  which  mentally  de- 
termines its  ends,  in  the  view  of  certain  fixed  relations 
already  known  to  be  sustained  toward  other  beings,  and 
which  directs  its  actions  toward  these  chosen  ends,  while  it- 
self existing  within  a  system  of  beings  on  which  the  results  of 
its  action  are  dependent. 

In  the  work-a-day  life  of  the  multitude  of  men  —  that 
which  is  so  significantly  called  "  real  life  "  as  distinct  from 
the  pursuits  of  the  mere  student  or  scientific  inquirer  —  they 
think  only  in  order  the  better  to  carry  out  their  purposes. 
Thought,  in  its  effort  to  put  the  thinker  into  correct  relations 
with  Reality,  is  definitively  and  consciously  practical;  that  is, 
teleological.  There  is  certainly  something  sublime  about  the 
way  in  which  the  meanest  of  human  beings  regards  all  other 
selves  and  other  things.  "What  is  it  good  for,  to  serve 
me  ?  "  —  this  is  the  chief  object  of  human  inquiry  and  re- 
search. The  multitude  are  made  indignant  or  aggrieved  by 
the  immense  and  fundamental  forces  of  nature  when  these 
forces  so  elude  their  insight  or  calculation  as  to  thwart,  or 
even  fail  to  further,  their  final  purposes.  Why  should  winds 
blow,  except  to  swell  the  sails  of  their  ships  ?  Why  should 
science  discover  new  means  of  mining  and  reducing  ores,  of 
smelting  and  hardening  metals,  of  driving  and  controlling 
carriages,  except  for  the  increased  comfort  of  themselves  and 
their  families  ?  Even  the  cold,  calm  stars,  so  far  beyond  the 
influence  of  human  passions  and  so  remote  from  the  more 
obvious  connections  with  human  interests,  must  needs  be 
thought  of  as  set  to  light  and  to  guide  their  way  by  land  or 
sea.  All  these  things,  and  all  other  things,  they  will  think 
or  inquire  about,  only  to  know  how  better  to  realize  some 
final  purpose  in  the  obtaining  of  good  for  themselves. 

When  considering  the  nature  of  all  reasoning  faculty  as 
coming  under  the  general  principle  supposed  to  control  every 
process  of  reasoning,  we  discovered  that  the  end  of  every  such 


480  THE  TELEOLOGY  OF  KNOWLEDGE 

process  is  set  by  some  terminal  judgment.  The  particular 
judgment  sought  is  knowledge  valid  for  the  relations  of  really 
existent  beings.  To  quote  (p.  308)  :  "  It  appears,  then,  that 
the  goal  of  that  cognition  after  which  the  mind  strives  in  its 
processes  of  reasoning  is  the  establishment  of  causal  relations." 
That  is  to  say,  Reality  in  its  different  interrelated  manifesta- 
tions is  a  problem  to  be  solved,  if  at  all  and  however  partially, 
by  consistent  and  persistent  thinking.  To  reverse  this  state- 
ment,—  and  it  certainly  admits  of  being  reversed  without 
impairing  its  truthfulness,  —  all  our  more  deliberate  thinking 
is  essentially  teleological ;  it  is  thinking  toward  the  end  of  an 
improved  solution  of  some  proposition  placed  before  the  min'd 
in  the  form  of  a  problem.  Is  the  case  really  thus  or  other- 
wise ?  What  do  you  judge  about  it  ?  But  if  one's  judgment 
is  not  already  formed,  or  prepared  to  leap  into  consciousness 
with  that  firmness  and  warmth  of  conviction  which  indicates 
a  readiness  also  to  allege  satisfactory  grounds  for  itself,  one 
must  still  think  about  the  matter  ;  and  one  will  think  soundly 
and  successfully,  indeed,  one  will  think  about  -this  matter  at 
all  (instead  of  merely  letting  thought  run  wild),  only  if  one's 
thinking  be  suffused  with  conscious  final  purpose. 

It  is  true  that  many  of  the  "  best  thoughts,"  both  of  the 
individual  and  of  the  race,  "  occur  to,"  or  "  spring  up  in,"  or 
"  flash  upon,"  the  mind  when  it  is  not  consciously  directed 
toward  the  solution  of  any  definite  problem ;  or,  at  any 
rate,  they  do  not  seem  to  be  born  of  thought  directed  upon 
particular  problems.  In  his  strong  despite  of  the  work  of 
intellect,  that  baser  tool  of  Will.  wJiicJi  is  indeed  only  a  func- 
Jion  of  the  brain,  Schopenhauer  exalts  the  function  of  intuition 
and  the  province  of  insight.  Place  yourself  before  the  con- 
crete image  of  the  thing  in  Nature  or  in  Art,  and,  without 
thinking,  but  the  rather  carefully  abstaining  from  all  that 
making  of  distinctions  which  is  so  fatal  to  the  apprehension 
of  the  Idea,  let  the  higher  truth  arise  within  you  :  such  is  his 
exhortation.  We,  too,  admit  the  value  of  the  contemplative 


THE  TELEOLOGY  OF  KNOWLEDGE  481 

as  distinguished  from  the  scientific  attitude  of  mind  toward 
Reality.  We  are  prepared  to  maintain  the  validity  of  the 
judgments  often  largely  arrived  at  by  this  method  of  cognition. 
The  artistic  and  religious  views  of  the  world,  or  of  any  single 
meanest  thing  in  the  world,  are  not  to  be  despised,  either  in 
the  behalf  of  common-sense  or  in  the  name  of  science.  But 
this  way  of  using  an  alleged  cognitive  faculty  only  affords 
another  kind  of  illustration  for  the  correct  epistemological 
theory  of  all  cognitive  faculty.  Artists  and  seers,  men  of 
insight  of  every  description,  seek  to  interpret  the  meaning  of 
the  real  things  and  actual  transactions  of  the  world  ;  and  all 
interpretation  of  meaning  is  peculiarly  a  teleological  affair. 
So  that  art  and  religion  —  like  philosophy  in  this  respect, 
which,  however,  transcends  both  by  comprehending  them  in 
harmony  with  the  standpoints  of  science  and  of  the  ordinary 
work-a-day  consciousness  —  habitually  tell  us  the  truth  they 
have  to  tell,  in  its  adaptation  to  promote  the  interests  of  the 
total  life  of  man.  The  fact  remains,  however,  that  there  is  no 
such  way  open  to  truth  as  that  which  Schopenhauer,  in  his 
superabundant  and  ill-regulated  use  of  figures  of  speech, 
describes  and  commends.  Artists  or  religious  seers,  and 
men  of  so-called  insight  generally,  must  do  a  bit  of  clear 
thinking  now  and  then ;  or  others  must  do  it  in  their  behalf, 
if  artistic  and  religious  representations  of  truth  are  to  enter 
into  the  organism  of  human  knowledge.  Every  judgment 
which  seers  pronounce  must  still  appear  before  the  human 
mind  as  a  problem  demanding  thought  for  its  better  solution. 
Indeed,  every  announcement  of  a  new  truth  or  of  a  largely 
modified  form  of  an  old  truth,  is  pretty  sure  to  illustrate  the 
teleology  of  all  cognition,  twice  over,  as  it  were.  For  it  is 
likely  to  be  set  up,  in  the  first  instance,  as  entitled  to  recep- 
tion because  it  gives  new  meaning  and  serviceableness  to  the 
organism  of  accepted  truths ;  and  then,  by  a  process  of  test- 
ing, it  finally  becomes  clear  that  this  particular  truth  is 
entitled,  on  grounds  of  the  valid  connections  it  can  establish 

31 


482  THE   TELEOLOGY  OF  KNOWLEDGE 

with  that  organism,  to  be  considered  one  of  its  useful  members. 
The  test  of  adaptation  to  the  ends  of  truth  never  fails,  in  the 
long  run,  to  be  pretty  rigidly  applied. 

The  right  to  insist  upon  the  inherently  teleological  nature 
of  thought  itself  might  be  indefinitely  illustrated  and  con- 
firmed by  appeal  to  the  procedure  of  all  the  particular 
sciences.  All  the  sciences  are  full  of  unsolved  problems,  and 
these  problems  are  being  perpetually  "  investigated "  by 
devotees  and  experts  in  these  sciences.  He  who  does  not 
know  what  the  problems  are,  and  how  in  general  goes  the 
approved  method  of  attacking  them,  is  little  likely  to  increase 
the  body  of  cognitions  which  constitutes  his  particular  science. 
But  investigation  means  a  "  following  in  the  tracks  of,"  a 
hunt  after,  some  cognitive  judgment  or  set  of  judgments  in 
which  the  problematical  attitude  of  mind  may  come  to  a 
settled  and  peaceful  termination.  And,  however  much  of  ex- 
periment and  mechanism  may  be  used  as  a  means  of  the 
investigation,  all  this  is  merely  a  matter  of  convenience, 
which  is  wholly  external  to  the  epistemological  doctrine  con- 
cerned. For  the  experimental  method  and  the  mechanical 
helps  only  furnish  the  guides,  the  checks,  the  fixed  points  of 
attainment,  for  the  thinking  process.  Investigation  is  not  a 
matter  of  the  smooth  running  of  machinery ;  nor  are  discov- 
ery and  verification  always  most  abundant  where  appliances 
are  most  numerous  and  costly.  The  thoughtful  mind  must  be 
supplied,  in  order  to  follow  the  tracks  of  fact  and  of  accepted 
law,  in  the  hunt  after  valid  and  appropriate  cognitive  judg- 
ments. Thus  does  thought  itself  show  most  obviously  in  con- 
crete form  its  immanent  teleological  character. 

Few  things  about  the  development  of  human  knowledge, 
as  illustrated  from  the  history  of  the  particular  sciences,  are  t 
more  impressive  than  is  the  multiplication  of  problems 
brought  about  by  every  solution  of  a  problem.  The  more  men 
know  about  the  world  of  things,  the  more  do  questions  present 
themselves  about  which  they  must  investigate  further  in 


THE  TELEOLOGY  OF  KNOWLEDGE  483 

order  to  know.  In  these  further  investigations  the  answers 
already  obtained  to  the  older  problems  may  be  used  as  known 
quantities  ;  but  this  very  use  either  reveals  a  large  number 
of  quantities  still  unknown,  or  it  throws  the  previous  solu- 
tions into  doubt,  so  that  the  old  problems  recur  in  modified 
form.  Never  before  did  the  picture  which  human  knowledge 
enables  us  to  draw,  of  the  real  beings  and  actual  transactions 
of  things,  itself  present  so  many  features  that  require  for 
their  clearer  delineation  yet  further  and  more  complicated 
investigations.  So  often  as  we  feel  at  liberty  to  substitute  a 
and  b  for  some  x  and  y  in  a  problem,  because  what  was  an 
unknown  quantity  has  now  been  reduced  to  terms  that  we 
can  comprehend,  new  and  hitherto  unsuspected  unknown  quan- 
tities appear  (z,  etc.,  advancing  in  number  toward  n).  Not 
infrequently  some  coefficient  must  be  added  to  our  a  and  b 
which  converts  them  into  terms  much  more  difficult  to  handle 
than  the  original  x  and  y  appeared  to  be  (perhaps  even  into  a 
/V/17^)-  Thus  is  all  growth  in  scientific  knowledge  com- 
pelled to  regard  itself  as  dependent  upon  the  use  of  past 
thoughts  in  order  progressively  to  enlarge  and  purify  the 
body  of  such  knowledge.  Each  single  cognition  appears  not 
to  have  its  end  in  itself ;  the  rather  is  it  of  use  to  suggest 
new  problems  to  thought  and  to  aid  in  the  solution  of  those 
problems.  But  as  these,  in  their  turn,  being  at  least  partially 
solved,  become  incorporate  with  the  body  of  cognition,  they 
also  must  be  made  to  serve  a  new  day  and  a  more  exacting 
generation  of  explorers. 

This  teleological  connection  of  the  truths  which  constitute 
the  body  of  scientific  knowledge,  regarded  as  mere  knowledge, 
might  be  further  illustrated  by  considering  how  the  different 
particular  sciences  admit  of  arrangement  under  the  idea  of 
final  purpose  and  as  respects  their  reciprocal  relations.  The 
very  nature  of  the  cognitive  judgments  with  which  they  re- 
spectively busy  themselves,  is  such  that  the  sciences  serve 
each  other's  ends,  as  those  placed  higher  in  a  roughly  graded 


484  THE   TELEOLOGY  OF  KNOWLEDGE 

ascending  scale  of  values  come  nearer  to  the  most  complex 
and  important  interests  of  human  life.  Note,  here,  how 
eager  the  students  of  each  particular  science  are  wont  to  be 
in  the  defence  of  the  claims  of  their  own  science  to  a  high 
place  in  this  scale;  how  jealous  of  its  honor  in  answering 
the  demands  to  display  these  claims  before  men;  and  fre- 
quently how  grasping  and  mean  in  the  spirit  shown  toward 
the  students  of  some  other  and  rival  form  of  science ! 
Thus  is  one  compelled  to  listen  to  the  arrogant  demand  that 
all  assured  forms  of  human  cognition  shall  be  reduced  to 
physical  or  chemical  phenomena ;  and  we  who  are  students 
of  psychology  as  the  science  of  mental  phenomena  are  sum- 
moned to  acknowledge  unquestioning  allegiance  to  "  authori- 
ties "  —  too  often  self-erected  and  the  more  disposed  to  be 
domineering  —  in  biology  or  anthropology. 

But  even  the  weaknesses  and  vices  evinced  in  such  con- 
tentions are  instructive.  More  and  more  obvious  and  indis- 
putable is  it  becoming  that  no  one  of  these  great  departments 
of  human  knowledge  is  going  readily  to  absorb  the  others. 
The  strength  of  every  piece  of  wood  or  metal,  the  behavior 
of  a  twisted  wire  or  of  a  bit  of  magnetized  iron,  the  con- 
struction and  use  of  any  simple  machine,  require  much  more 
than  mathematical  physics  can  furnish,  in  order  that  they 
may  become  objects  of  scientific  cognition.  But  the  prin- 
ciples of  mathematical  physics  may  be  regarded  as  the  indis- 
pensable means  for  the  attainment  of  this  cognition,  and 
for  reaching  one  of  the  ends  for  which  these  principles  are 
fitted  in  the  service  rendered  to  such  cognition.  The  chemi- 
cal constitution  of  the  simplest  compound  substances,  and  the 
laws  of  the  behavior  of  the  elements  which  enter  into  this 
constitution,  afford  problems  which  physics  is  entirely  unable 
to  solve.  But  physics  affords  a  species  of  knowledge  which  is 
essential  in  order  to  solve  the  problems  of  chemistry ;  its  study 
is  subsidiary  and  auxiliary  to  the  end  which  a  knowledge  of 
the  atomic  structure  and  atomic  qualifications  of  things  real- 


THE  TELEOLOGY  OF  KNOWLEDGE  485 

izes.  Many  heroic  attempts  have  been  made  to  convert  biol- 
ogy into  a  purely  physico-chemical  science  ;  but  they  have 
all  been  baffled  hitherto,  and  the  progress  of  the  more  com- 
plex study  of  living  beings  is  constantly  outstripping  the 
increase  in  the  outfit  of  means  which  such  physico-chemical 
science  supplies.  Not  an  amoeba,  however  obviously  undiffer- 
entiated  even  as  respects  endosarc  and  ectosarc,  and  not  a 
germ  of  any  lowest  order  of  plants,  that  does  not  offer  prob- 
lems before  which  the  combined  efforts  of  physics  and  chemis- 
try are  forced  to  acknowledge  their  impotency.  Yet  the 
scientific  biologist  must  study  physics  and  chemistry  in  order 
even  intelligently  to  approach  the  study  of  biology.  If,  now, 
we  go  on  from  this  point  of  view  to  arrange  the  remaining 
branches  of  the  scientific  tree  in  accordance  with  any  of  the 
current  schemes,  we  only  illustrate  and  enforce  the  same 
truth :  All  the  particular  sciences  may  be  looked  upon  as 
necessary  and  serviceable  to  the  completer  and  more  satisfac- 
tory knowledge  of  the  history  of  human  development. 

If,  however,  a  scheme  for  the  arrangement  of  the  sciences 
should  be  constructed  from  some  other  point  of  view  than 
that  for  which  the  understanding  of  the  unfolding  life  of  the 
race  is  the  final  purpose  to  be  served,  this  altered  scheme 
could  not  be  free  from  obligation  to  illustrate  the  teleo- 
logical  idea.  Such  are  the  connections,  in  fact,  amongst  the 
various  cognitive  judgments  that,  in  order  to  test  and  im- 
prove or  enlarge  any  particular  group  of  such  judgments,  we 
have  to  make  use  of  means  derived  from  other  groups.  If  the 
body  of  human  knowledge  be  not  considered  as  built  after  the 
likeness  of  the  human  body,  where,  from  one  point  of  view, 
all  the  other  members  may  be  regarded  as  serviceable  to  the 
supreme  and  controlling  portion  of  the  nervous  system,  still  it 
must  be  regarded  after  the  analogy  of  some  sort  of  an  organism. 
A  system  of  cognitions  that  sustain  no  relations  of  reciprocal 
dependence  and  ministration  to  the  whole  body  of  cognitions 
can  scarcely  be  conceived  of  as  existing  within  the  horizon 


486  THE  TELEOLOGY  OF  KNOWLEDGE 

of  human  thought.  If  the  vertebrate  be  not  a  favorable  type 
for  our  fittest  figure  of  speech,  let  it  be  the  radiate  or  the  mol- 
luscan.  These,  too,  are  plans  of  structure,  and  thus  evince 
the  immanent  teleology  of  human  thinking.  Lower  forms  of 
knowledge  in  order  to  higher  forms  ;  or  one  branch  of  knowl- 
edge running  in  one  direction  away  from  a  common  centre 
in  which  other  branches,  radiating  differently,  take  their  rise  ; 
or  a  hard  shell  of  external  fact,  which  seems  lifeless  but  sur- 
rounds the  mysterious  and  vital  "  pulp  "  of  truth,  —  use  what 
analogy  one  will,  the  thought  of  the  different  sciences  is  so 
related  that  no  student  in  any  one  of  them  can  free  himself 
from  the  necessity  of  serving  them  all. 

Thus  far  the  teleology  of  knowledge  has  been  considered  as 
immanent,  so  to  speak,  in  the  very  nature  of  knowledge  itself. 
Each  partial  activity  or  stage  of  cognition  has  been  regarded 
as  serviceable  to  some  other  cognitive  attainment  or  advanced 
stage  of  cognition,  —  a  certain  knowledge  to  the  end  of  more 
knowledge.  The  particular  bodily  activities  in  commerce  with 
things,  the  acts  of  attentive  perception,  recognitive  memory, 
and  ratiocination  have  been  explained  as  looking  to  something 
lying  beyond  themselves  ;  and  the  systems  of  cognitive  judg- 
ments grouped  together  into  the  so-called  sciences  have  been 
regarded  as  serving  to  advance  each  other's  interests.  Thus 
does  knowledge  exist,  and  grow,  for  knowledge's  sake  ;  but  we 
cannot,  however,  regard  this  as  a  satisfactory  statement  of  the 
final  purpose  most  obviously  served  by  human  cognition. 

Is  knowledge  ever —  whether  one  has  in  mind  some  partic- 
ular cognition  or  the  entire  development  of  cognition  for  the 
race  —  an  end  in  itself  ?  This  is  a  question  to  which  neither 
an  offhand  affirmative  nor  an  unqualified  negative  affords  a 
satisfactory  answer.  The  schoolboy,  whining  over  his  tasks 
and  rebelling  against  the  limitations  thus  enforced  upon  the 
joyful  exercise  of  his  powers,  angrily  inquires  as  to  the  use  of 
what  he  is  about.  How  much  of  all  "  the  stuff  "  he  is  set  to 
learning  will  repay  him  any  form  of  good  in  his  future  life  ? 


THE  TELEOLOGY  OF  KNOWLEDGE  487 

Observe  that  the  request,  however  disrespectfully  made,  is 
reasonable  :  he  will  have  his  knowledge  serve  his  Self.  But 
if  his  present  point  of  view  seems  to  be  selected  too  much  in 
the  interests  of  selfishness,  let  him  be  inquired  of,  whether  he 
does  not  think  that  his  knowledge  should  also  serve  other 
selves  than  his  own.  It  is  not  unlikely  that  a  fair  answer  may 
be  obtained  to  this  suggestion,  and  that  the  boy's  investigations 
into  the  teleology  of  knowledge  may  be  so  modified  as  to  shape 
the  question  thus  :  Of  what  use  to  my  Self,  or  to  any  one  else, 
will  it  be,  that  I  should  acquire  this  particular  knowledge  ? 
Now  before  the  profoundest  student  of  epistemology  undertakes 
the  discussion  of  this  question,  even  as  it  is  asked  from  the  point 
of  view  of  the  most  ignorant  tyro,  he  must  take  his  choice  of  one 
of  two  possible  episternological  positions.  Either  he  must 
affirm,  or  he  must  deny,  that  knowledge  is  rightfully  to  be 
held  responsible  in  the  demand  to  show  its  usefulness  for  any 
end  lying  outside  of  itself.  Confusion  upon  this  point  is  by  no 
means  confined  to  those  whose  nearer  relations  to  the  petu- 
lant schoolboy  force  them  into  unthinking  answers  to  his 
inquiry.  For  example,  the  biologist  may  defend  the  tenet  that 
the  very  existence  of  cognitive  mind  in  man  is  satisfactorily 
explained  by  showing  the  usefulness  of  the  more  primary 
stages  and  subsequent  developments  of  mind  in  the  struggle 
for  existence.  Mind  is  of  use  to  the  end  of  life,  —  mere  life, 
and  more  and  more  of  life.  But  now  let  the  biologist  be  asked 
this  question  :  Of  what  use  is  your  own  theory  respecting  the 
evolution  of  life  (Lamarckian,  Weissmannian,  or  other)  in  pro- 
moting the  fuller  and  higher  life  of  man?  Can  he  then  con- 
sistently fall  back  upon  the  alleged  truthfulness  of  his  own 
theory  to  justify  it  in  its  seeming  attacks  upon  those  faiths 
and  hopes  which  are  good  for  men  to  live  and  die  by  ? 

When  the  question  of  the  teleology  of  knowledge  takes  such 
shape  as  the  foregoing,  we  begin  to  realize  the  awkwardness 
of  our  mental  situation.  On  the  one  hand,  we  cannot  satisfy 
our  total  consciousness  with  the  unqualified  claim  that  knowl- 


488  THE  TELEOLOGY  OF  KNOWLEDGE 

edge  is  an  end  in  itself ;  and  that  it  may  therefore  rightfully 
be  sought  and,  when  found,  promulgated  to  others  without  the 
slightest  regard  to  its  ministrations  in  the  service  of  a  higher 
and  more  comprehensive  good.  On  the  other  hand,  we  feel 
it  unworthy  of  our  rational  manhood  to  regard  the  use  of  the 
cognitive  faculties  of  man  as  having  merely  an  instrumental 
value  ;  and  we  shrink  from  the  estimate  of  the  efforts  and 
attainments  of  science  and  philosophy  solely  according  to  the 
services  they  render  to  the  material  advantages  of  humanity, 
or  even  to  the  increase  of  their  pleasures  and  the  alleviation 
of  their  miseries,  as  though  it  were  a  narrowing  and  degrading 
estimate.  This  is  an  apparent  antinomy  of  a  practical  rather 
than  of  a  purely  theoretical  sort.  It  admits  of  solution  only 
if  the  limits  of  purely  episternological  discussion  be  some- 
what transcended,  and  the  philosophy  of  ethics  be  taken  into 
account  as  furnishing  a  possible  standard  for  the  required 
estimate.  In  other  words,  the  question  has  now  become  so 
comprehensive  in  its  bearings  that  it  requires  light  to  be  shed 
upon  it  from  one's  view  as  to  the  total  nature  and  supreme 
ideals  of  the  Self.  But  surely  there  is  nothing  introduced 
which  is  intrinsically  foreign  to  the  answers  already  given  to 
the  epistemological  problem,  now  that  the  question  has  been 
definitively  raised  as  to  the  meaning  and  final  purpose  of  our 
total  personal  Life.  For  these  answers  themselves  showed 
that  this  same  Self  is  all  concerned  —  intellect,  feeling,  and 
will  —  in  every  concrete  cognition.  Nor  can  the  development 
of  the  individual  Self,  in  its  total  being,  be  divorced  in  theory 
or  in  practice  from  the  growth  of  knowledge  ;  and  the  same 
thing  is  true  concerning  the  evolution  of  that  complex  organi- 
zation of  selves  which  is  thought  of  as  the  human  race.  But, 
further,  the  world  of  things  —  NATURE,  "  writ  large,"  and 
made  imposing  by  the  use  of  capital  letters  —  is  known  only  as 
revealed  upon  conditions  furnished  by  the  development  of  the 
Self,  and  as  actually  possessed  of  qualifications  analogous  to 
those  which  we  know  ourselves  to  possess.  How,  then,  can  it 


THE  TELEOLOGY   OF  KNOWLEDGE  489 

fail  to  be  true  that  the  question  as  to  the  meaning  and  the 
final  purpose  of  all  human  knowledge  becomes  merged  in  the 
question  as  to  the  total  nature  and  ideal  ends  of  Selfhood  ? 
The  epistemological  problem  is  answered  by  reference  to  the 
aims  of  the  Being  that  realizes  the  highest  and  best  conception 
of  Life.  Cognition  is  part  of  the  very  life  of  the  Self ;  but  it 
is  not  the  ivhole  of  that  life  ;  it  serves  that  life  in  its  striving 
after  the  realization  of  its  ideals. 

The  complaining  schoolboy  is  told  that  he  must  acquire 
knowledge  in  order  to  be  happy,  respectable,  influential,  suc- 
cessful in  life.  For  it  would  be  disgraceful  for  him  to  remain 
in  ignorance  ;  uneducated,  he  could  never  succeed  with  his 
fellow-men  ;  and  "  knowledge  is  power."  So  far  as  all  this  is 
true  and  has  a  bearing  in  the  direction  of  a  defensible  answer 
to  his  complaints,  it  means  that  knowledge  is  an  indispensable 
instrument  to  a  better  and  more  content-full  life.  Those 
sciences,  like  chemistry,  botany,  zoology,  physiology,  bacteri- 
ology, psychology,  and  the  so-called  science  of  sociology,  which 
stand  in  closer  relations  to  the  practical  interests  of  men,  are 
fond  of  showing  how  much  they  have  done,  can  now  do,  and 
hope  to  accomplish,  for  making  the  existence  of  men  more 
tolerable  and  happy.  Meteorology  has  helped  to  make  the 
farmer  surer  of  his  crop  and  the  sailor  of  his  craft ;  and  do 
we  not  all  thereby  know,  at  least  a  trifle  better,  when  it  is 
safest  to  go  without  umbrellas  or  overcoats  ?  The  world  of 
manufactures  has  been  built  up,  and  the  world  of  finance  con- 
vulsed, by  the  rapid  increase  of  knowledge  in  metallurgy. 
Even  the  student  of  the  higher  mathematics  and  the  wakeful 
watcher  of  the  stars  put  forth  a  less  boisterous  claim  that 
somehow  —  very  indirectly  oftentimes,  to  be  sure  —  the  happi- 
ness and  prosperity  of  the  race  has  been  increased  by  their 
discoveries. 

And,  indeed,  the  history  of  the  physical  sciences  shows  that 
those  truths  which  at  first  seem  most  remote  from  the  lives 
of  men  not  infrequently  become  closely  connected  with  their 


490  THE   TELEOLOGY   OF   KNOWLEDGE 

very  ordinary  but  important  interests.  In  bacteriology  and 
physiology,  for  example,  it  is  not  unlikely  that  to  the  theoreti- 
cal interest  in  the  problem  of  life,  rather  than  to  the  benevo- 
lent desire  to  benefit  mankind,  must  the  recent  helpful  appli- 
cations of  these  sciences  be  ascribed.  But  this  only  illustrates 
how  man,  in  the  conscious  and  deliberate  pursuit  of  knowl- 
edge, most  often  actually  serves  the  end  of  improving  the  con- 
dition of  mankind.  The  discoverers  in  physical  science  are 
thus  justly  to  be  reckoned  among  the  great  benefactors  of 
humanity.  Psychology,  too,  having  withdrawn  its  long-stand- 
ing offer  to  theology  of  an  "  apodictic  "  proof  for  the  imma- 
teriality and  immortality  of  the  human  soul,  has  recently 
promised  to  render  invaluable  services  to  pedagogy  and  to  the 
therapeutics  of  the  insane  and  of  the  criminal.  While  an 
indefinite  number  of  groups  of  empirical  data,  some  of  which 
have  hitherto  received  only  a  very  vague  speculative  treatment, 
are  now,  under  the  name  of  "  sociology,"  striving  to  attain  a 
high  grade  of  approbation  from  the  public,  by  offering  the 
services  of  the  science  into  which  they  have  been  agglomer- 
ated, for  the  improvement  of  actually  existing  social  condi- 
tions. What  if,  for  the  present,  the  will  must  be  taken  for 
the  deed  ?  All  these  branches  of  knowledge  virtually  con- 
fess that  they  have  not  their  end  in  themselves,  as  knowledge 
merely,  but  that  they  exist  and  grow  in  order  to  enlarge  and 
ameliorate  the  total  existence  of  man. 

Science,  however,  is  not  satisfied  with  so  much  of  such 
service  as  it  has  already  furnished  or  can  hope  to  offer  in  the 
future.  It  spends  months  with  the  microscope  over  diatoma- 
ceous  deposits  or  volcanic  ash,  examines,  describes,  and  classi- 
fies the  wonderful  minute  forms  which  it  discovers,  publishes 
the  results,  to  the  credit  of  the  investigator  and  perhaps  in  the 
name  of  learned  societies ;  and  then  all  minds  interested  in 
science  agree  that  such  work  is  admirable  and  worthy  to  be 
done.  Who  would  not  be  justly  indignant  at  the  suggestion 
that  the  benefit  of  all  this  expensive  work  is  to  be  measured 


THE  TELEOLOGY  OF  KNOWLEDGE  491 

by  the  possible  discovery  that  deposits  of  the  one  kind  may  be 
employed  as  polishing  powder  or  as  a  non-conducting  packing 
for  steam-pipes ;  and  that  deposits  of  the  other  kind  have  their 
most  important  use  in  the  manufacture  of  soap  ?  But,  after 
all,  why  should  science  go  into  such  matters ;  and  of  what 
real  use  is  much  of  the  knowledge  of  this  kind  ? 

At  the  other  end  of  the  line  from  this  infinitely  detailed 
description  of  natural  matters-of-fact  stand  those  forms  of 
knowledge,  or  those  attempts  at  knowledge,  which  are  most 
purely  abstract  and  speculative.  We  have  already  referred  to 
the  case  of  pure  mathematics  in  another  connection.  It  was 
there  shown  that  the  truth  it  discovers  is  not  the  truth  of 
things,  but  the  truth  of  possible  connections  between  abstrac- 
tions derived  from  the  quantitative  aspects  of  things.  More 
deeply  considered,  it  appears  as  truth  concerning  certain  forms 
of  the  perceiving  and  thinking  —  the  actual  transactions  —  of 
a  reality  called  mind.  In  other  words,  in  no  other  specula- 
tions is  thought  dealing  so  purely  with  its  own  abstractions  as 
in  mathematical  speculations.  But  now  let  the  question  as  to 
the  final  purpose  of  such  cognitions  be  raised ;  and  to  repeat  the 
answer  which  is  usually  given  to  the  schoolboy  groaning  over 
his  first  sums  in  arithmetic,  or  to  the  academician  struggling 
with  the  new  geometry  or  with  calculus,  —  namely,  that  the 
acquiring  of  this  kind  of  knowledge  is  in  the  interests  of 
"  mental  discipline,"  —  is  to  subscribe,  in  almost  too  easy-going 
fashion,  to  the  supremacy  of  a  narrow  teleological  idea.  No 
one  likes  discipline  or  seeks  it  for  its  own  sake.  All,  however, 
like  activity,  enjoy  being  alive  in  some  way  ;  and  all  discipline 
is  to  the  end  of  a  fuller,  richer,  and  higher  life.  If,  now,  we 
declare  that  the  enlarged  capacity  of  human  life,  —  not  only, 
and  perhaps  not  chiefly,  intellectual,  but  aesthetical  arid  quasi- 
ethical,  which  these  studies  in  mathematics  and  the  natural 
sciences  bring  — is  the  end  to  which  the  discipline  of  acquiring 
such  cognitions  tends,  we  surely  shall  not  be  so  very  far 
astray.  It  is  not  vapid  sentimentality,  but  the  application  of 


492  THE  TELEOLOGY  OF  KNOWLEDGE 

truths  forced  upon  us  by  our  entire  epistemological  inquiry, 
when  it  is  said  :  Such  knowledge  is  worth  while  if  it  makes 
human  souls  stronger,  more  beautiful,  and  more  happy.  Like 
all  other  knowledge,  it  exists  and  grows  in  the  interests  of  the 
Self,  and  for  the  better  progressive  realization  of  the  con- 
sciously accepted  ideals  of  the  Self.  But  in  saying  this  the 
essence  and  the  meaning  of  knowledge  have  been  absorbed  in 
the  sphere  of  conduct. 

There  are  certain  cognitions,  or  attempts  at  cognition, 
which  belong  more  definitely  to  the  moral  and  religious  sphere. 
With  regard  to  the  realities  corresponding  to  these  classes  of 
judgments  when  they  assume  a  cognitive  form,  the  actual  atti- 
tudes of  men  are  exceedingly  various.  The  average  man,  who 
has  neither  great  store  of  scientific  knowledge  nor  gift  of 
reflection  and  speculative  thinking,  seems  to  hold  a  position 
toward  the  alleged  truths  of  ethics  and  religion  that  belongs 
to  a  sort  of  middle  ground.  These  truths  are  not  so  sure  for 
him,  nor  are  they  given  in  the  same  way  to  his  cognitive 
faculty,  as  are  the  ordinary  accepted  truths  about  material 
things.  He  has  a  different  conviction,  and  a  larger  assured 
content  of  knowledge,  when  he  is  talking  or  thinking  about  his 
material  surroundings,  having  just  left  off  talking  and  think- 
ing about  facts  and  principles  in  morals  or  about  the  existence 
and  attributes  of  God.  But  he  may  be  readier  to  assent  with 
heart  and  head,  to  take  the  attitude  which  he  identifies  with 
that  of  knowledge,  toward  the  fundamental  truths  of  morals 
and  religion,  than  toward  the  speculative  mysteries  of  atoms, 
or  of  ether,  or  of  fourth-dimensioned  space,  etc.  Moreover, 
he  is  disposed  to  be  liberal  in  his  demands  upon  things  for  a 
perfectly  constant  and  intelligible  behavior ;  if  only  his  newer 
and  more  surprising  cognitions  will  minister  to  a  longing  for 
the  unfathomable,  and  to  an  interest  in  the  world  as  a  possible 
home  for  human  Selfhood  in  its  infinite  capacity  for  life  and 
for  development. 

We  are  not  just  now  writing  a  treatise  on  Ethics  or  the 


THE  TELEOLOGY  OF  KNOWLEDGE  493 

Philosophy  of  Religion.  We  are  not  even  discussing  what,  in 
special,  are  the  foundations  and  the  criteria  of  truth  con- 
cerning these  subjects.  We  believe,  however,  that  such  truth 
originates  in  and  is  rendered  objectively  valid  by,  the  attempt 
to  harmonize  our  total  experience  substantially  as  all  truths 
originate  and  are  rendered  objectively  valid.  What  is  now 
to  be  noted  is  that  the  more  plain  teleological  import  of  the 
truths  of  ethics  and  of  religion  is,  in  itself  considered,  greatly 
to  their  advantage.  To  think  on  Freedom,  God,  and  Immor- 
tality, and  to  attain  such  items  of  knowledge  —  such  facts, 
conceptions,  and  judgments  although  involving  large  possi- 
bility of  mistake  and  even  no  little  error  —  as  may  be  had  by 
a  diligent,  judicious,  and  prolonged  endeavor,  is  best  worth  the 
while.  For  in  their  relations  to  that  final  purpose  which  all 
knowledge  serves,  and  which  has  been  somewhat  vaguely  de- 
fined as  the  enlargement  and  elevation  of  the  total  life  of  the 
Self,  these  subjects  are  of  pre-eminent  final  purpose.  Knowl- 
edge of  diatoms,  and  of  the  bones  of  extinct  animals,  of  the 
probable  order  of  the  strata  as  affecting  the  possible  arrange- 
ment of  the  biological  series  in  accordance  with  the  Darwinian 
hypothesis,  is  a  good  to  be  obtained,  if  possible.  But  one 
ounce  of  knowledge  as  to  how  the  soul  of  man  shall  attain  the 
better  realization  of  its  own  ideal  is  worth  tons  of  informa- 
tion as  to  fact,  or  of  speculative  theory,  as  put  forth  by  the 
researches  of  the  foregoing  forms  of  natural  science. 

The  statement  just  made  is  true,  however,  only  in  case  one 
is  tempted  to  sever  the  vital  ties  which  are  meant  to  bind  all 
human  knowledge  into  the  greatest  possible  organic  unity.  If 
the  eager  advocate  of  the  value  of  scientific  knowledge  for  its 
own  sake  is  also  disposed  to  depreciate  the  alleged  truths  of 
morals  and  religion  because  of  their  uncertainty  and  uselessness 
from  his  own  standpoint,  he  may  be  reminded  of  the  following 
two  epistemological  principles :  All  human  cognition  implies 
a  willing,  believing,  and  sympathetic  Self;lind  all  cognition 
has  its  end  in  the  enlargement  and  elevation  of  the  Self.  But 


494  THE  TELEOLOGY  OF  KNOWLEDGE 

it  is  time  to  consider  another  important  aspect  of  the  teleology 
of  all  knowledge.  To  state  this  aspect  as  it  now  appears  in 
its  most  obvious  and  extreme  form  :  The  particular  cognitive 
judgments,  and  the  sum-total  of  cognitions  present  at  any 
particular  time  in  the  history  of  the  individual,  or  of  the  race, 
must  be  considered  in  the  light  of  the  principle  of  final  pur- 
pose ;  but  knowledge  itself  has  been  seen  to  be  a  certain  atti- 
tude of  the  mind  which  implies  a  correspondence  between 
mental  representations  and  the  being'  and  transactions  of  the 
really  Existent:  it  follows,  then,  that  the  principle  of  final 
purpose  must  be  immanent  in  all  Reality,  so  far  as  known  or 
knowable  to  man. 

The  conclusion  just  announced  may  be  arrived  at  and  stated 
in  a  somewhat  different  way.  Human  experience,  when  it 
becomes  cognitive,  becomes  essentially  £nms-subjective.  This 
is,  indeed,  the  essential  thing  about  cognition  ;  it  is  this 
qualification  which  gives  epistemology  its  central  problem. 
But  at  its  birth,  and  at  every  stage  of  its  growth,  the  system 
of  cognitive  judgments  not  only  follows  the  principle  of  suffi- 
cient reason,  but  it  also  goes  in  the  direction  indicated  by  the 
end  desired  to  be  gained.  Only  in  this  way  does  cognitive 
faculty  fulfil  its  appointed  mission.  I  want  to  know  ;  I 
inquire  and  reason  to  know  ;  I  actually  attain  to  know,  — 
because  I  want  to  reach  some  form  of  good,  or  to  avoid  some 
form  of  evil.  And  even  that  experience  which  I  have  with 
real  things,  so  far  as  they  do  not  seem  to  be  connected  with 
my  more  immediate  practical  interests,  appears  significant  as 
a  complex  in  which  cognition  is  directed  by,  and  subordinated 
to.  the  end  of  a  larger  and  higher  life.  Now  this  trans-subjec- 
tive quality  of  all  knowledge,  which  carries  with  it  the  vali- 
dating in  reality  of  the  principle  of  sufficient  reason,  does  the 
same  thing  with  the  principle  of  final  purpose.  —  Tim 


of  cognition  are  known  not  onlv_a§_connecte^intft  a 

but  also  aj^late44o-£ach_Qtherunder  the 


ppmciplp.  ofjinal  purpose.     They  are  known  as  actually  thu 


THE  TELEOLOGY  OF  KNOWLEDGE  495 

and  flu  a  g,fl  f  ruly  and  obviously  as  they  are  known  to 
be,  in  reality,  causally  connected.  Here,  again,  however,  just 
as'tmcfisobliged  to  turn  to  one's  most  primary  experience  of 
the  Self  in  order  to  find  out  what  it  is  to  be,  in  reality,  caus- 
ally connected,  so  does  one  have  to  turn  to  another  aspect  of 
the  most  primary  experience  of  the  Self  to  discover  what  it 
is  for  the  idea  of  final  purpose  to  be  immanent  in  Reality. 
And  just  as  all  human  knowledge  of  what  Things  are,  in 
respect  to  their  interdependent  forms  of  activity,  is  framed 
after  the  analogy  of  this  experience  with  the  Self,  even  so  is  all 
human  knowledge  of  the  ends  which  things  realize  dependent 
upon  the  postulate  of  an  analogy  that  arises  in  the  same  Self 
as  its  source. 

The  critical  doctrine  of  the  immanency  of  final  purpose  in 
Nature  belongs  to  Metaphysics  and  to  the  Philosophy  of 
Religion  rather  than  to  Epistemology.  The  same  doctrine 
belongs  also  among  the  discussions  of  the  philosophy  of  con- 
duct and  of  the  beautiful.  The  universal  presence  of  the  tele- 
ological  idea  in  all  branches  of  philosophy,  silently  awaiting 
either  the  scornful  rejection,  the  uncritical  reception,  or  the 
patient  examination  of  every  profoundly  reflective  thinker,  is 
itself  an  instructive  epistemological  phenomenon.  It  proves 
that  some  kind  of  a  teleology  must  form  a  fundamental  part 
of  every  system  of  philosophy.  How,  indeed,  could  the  fact  be 
otherwise,  since  all  knowledge  involves  the  entire  life  of  the 
Self  ;  and  since  each  cognitive  iudgmenFaboutthings  known 
"  a»  nofcSeTves  ascribes  to  them  some  quality,  or  Action,  'or 
relation_jwhich  is  derived,  in  accordance  with  a  postulated 

flip  rlppths  of  the  SeJ12- 


B  ut  jio  the  objects  of  human  knowledge,  in  reality,  exist 
and  behave  for  the  actualization  of  final  purposes,  as  they 
undoubtedly  seem  to  us  to  exist  and  to  behave  ?  The  fuller 
answer  to  this  inquiry  is  not  a  problem  for  epistemology  to 
undertake.  Yet  the  critical  doctrine  of  knowledge  has  already 
put  before  us  certain  truths  that  offer  a  partial  answer,  and 


496  THE   TELEOLOGY  OF  KNOWLEDGE 

that  suggest  lines  of  thinking  along  which  one  may  follow  in 
the  hope  of  attaining  much  toward  the  fuller  answer.  When 
the  object  of  cognition  is  the  Self  as  known  by  itself,  there 
can  be  no  doubt  as  to  what  the  answer  must  be.  1  know  that 
I  am,  in  my  real  being,  a  living  embodiment  of  the  teleological 
principle ;  and  that  it  is  actually  the  explanation  of  much 
which  I  do.  This  is  only  to  say :  I  know  that  I  am  so  consti- 
tuted as  to  set  ends  before  me  for  realization ;  and  that  much 
of  my  action,  including  my  use  of  cognitive  faculty,  is,  in  fact, 
controlled  by  the  principle  of  final  purpose. 

But  while  proceeding  along  this  line  of  inquiry  for  ends,  as 
along  that  line  which  the  principle  of  sufficient  reason  marks 
out,  the  mind  comes  upon  not  a  few  errors ;  and  1  quickly 
reach  the  place  where  limits  of  nescience  meet  the  eternal 
effort  to  get  an  answer  to  the  question,  "  What  for  ? "  as  well 
as  to  the  question,  "  Why  ?  "  The  outfit  of  human  faculties, 
body  and  mind,  roughly  considered,  may  be  brought  under  the 
teleological  idea ;  but  to  the  finer  and  more  complicated 
questionings  after  the  supreme  ends  of  human  activity  and 
human  life,  only  answers  that  are  either  highly  conjectural  or 
obviously  liable  to  large  admixtures  of  error  can,  in  general, 
be  given.  Even  so,  however,  this  case  is  scarcely  more  hazard- 
ous than  is  the  case  of  those  answers  which  physiological  and 
psychological  science  gives  to  the  inquiry  after  a  causal  ex- 
planation for  the  structure  and  functioning  of  the  same 
faculties.  Indeed,  the  causal  explanation  of  all  states  of 
consciousness  cannot  be  satisfactorily  put  forward  without 
large  recognition  of  the  immanence  of  the  idea  of  final  pur- 
pose in  the  actual  life  of  the  Self.  I  know  myself  as  actually 
adapted  for,  and  striving  after,  certain  ends;  no  class  of 
judgments  can  be  clearer  or  surer  than  such  as  affirm  the 
knowledge  of  these  ends. 

What  is  true  of  self-knowledge  in  this  regard  is  also  true 
of  the  knowledge  of  other  selves.  We  know  our  fellow-men 
as  objects  in  which  the  idea  of  final  purpose  is  immanent,  — 


THE  TELEOLOGY  OF  KNOWLEDGE  497 

necessary  to  explain  to  us  their  nature  and  their  behavior. 
What  is  matter  of  envisagement  on  every  man's  part  for  him- 
self is  matter  of  incontestable  inference  for  the  real  being 
and  actual  transactions  of  other  men.  Indeed,  without  the 
growth  of  experience  along  the  line  of  the  teleological  idea, 
all  knowledge  of  human  nature  is  impossible.  All  the  sciences 
treat  of  man  as  a  being  capable  of  consciously  adopting  ends 
and  of  making  them  determinative  of  his  actions  in  the  pur- 
suit of  these  ends.  What  is  called  "  practical  acquaintance  " 
with  humanity,  and  the  happy  knack  both  of  understanding 
others  and  of  influencing  them  in  conduct,  consists  largely  in 
this  very  kind  of  cognition.  Even  to  speak  of  having  a  sci- 
ence of  man,  in  his  complex  relations  to  nature  and  to  his 
fellows,  that  should  be  built  up  in  complete  disregard  of  the 
principle  of  final  purpose,  would  be  to  utter  a  mockery. 

The  higher  species  of  the  animals  below  man  are  also 
known  as  actually  possessed  by  the  principle  of  final  purpose, 
and  as  acting  and  developing  in  certain  ways  rather  than 
others,  because  they  pursue  ends  that  are  set  by  some  con- 
scious form  of  good.  Only  very  recently  has  modern  biology 
shown  signs  of  a  return  to  a  larger  sanity  of  mind  in  its  atti- 
tude toward  teleology.  It  may  be  —  indeed,  it  seems  to  be 
the  truth  —  that  man  alone  is  capable  of  setting  before  him- 
self the  attainment  of  knowledge  as  something  valuable  for 
its  own  sake  ;  and  a  fortiori  man  alone  can  hold  up  in  con- 
sciousness, and  pursue  in  conduct,  the  ends  set  by  the  ethical, 
the  assthetical,  or  the  religious  ideals.  Neither  do  the  lower 
animals  appear  to  have  the  mental  equipment  necessary  for 
selecting  eudaemonistic  ends  that  are  very  complex  and  ele- 
vated, or  that  are  realizable  only  in  the  distant  future,  and 
by  the  patient  combination  of  complicated  instrumentalities. 
Less  evidence  is  there  that  any  of  these  animals  ever  holds  up 
in  consciousness,  as  an  end  of  effort,  the  realization  of  his 
selfhood  in  accordance  with  a  consciously  accepted  ideal. 
Now  this  is  precisely  what  every  human  being  does  who  be- 

32 


498  THE  TELEOLOGY  OF  KNOWLEDGE 

comes  developed  into  full  ethical  consciousness.  All  the 
animals  of  the  higher  species,  however,  —  and,  indeed,  it  is 
becoming  increasingly  difficult  to  say  how  low  down  this 
same  observation  may  not  extend,  —  are  known  obviously  to 
acknowledge  the  presence  of  the  idea  of  final  purpose.  Their 
real  being  and  their  actual  transactions  cannot  be  expressed 
without  vindicating  the  applicability  to  them  of  the  teleological 
principle.  Indeed,  some  of  the  advanced  seers  of  biology  and 
of  comparative  zoology  even  dare  to  predict  that  whereas 
not  long  ago  it  was  proposed  to  make  psychology  a  branch  of 
biology,  and  biology  a  branch  of  physico-chemical  science,  the 
next  era  will  see  biology  itself  treated  largely  as  a  species  of 
psychology. 

He  who  can  watch  the  embryonic  development  of  any  ani- 
mal without  once  thinking  of  change  and  growth  in  ac- 
cordance with  immanent  ideas,  must  have  strange  powers  of 
thinking  indeed.  A  critical  metaphysics  can  show  that  no 
conception  of  any  real  thing,  however  mean  in  nature  or 
strictly  "  material  "  in  structure  and  behavior,  can  be  framed 
without  availing  itself  of  the  "  immanent  idea."  But  now  let 
it  simply  be  noted  that  the  advancing  knowledge  of  all  beings 
which  really  live  and  actually  grow,  falls,  of  necessity,  in 
large  measure  under  the  influence  of  the  principle  of  final 
purpose.  Every  answer  to  the  question,  Why  do  the  embry- 
onic changes  occur  in  this  rather  than  some  other  way?  —  a 
proliferation  of  cells  here,  an  aggregation  of  cells  there,  a 
wonderful  differentiation  of  what  hitherto  appeared  homo- 
geneous in  one  place,  and  in  another  a  multiplication  and 
massing  of  similar  elements  —  must  always  appeal  for  help 
to  teleology.  The  scanty  knowledge  gained  by  observation  as 
to  the  efficient  causes  which  control  the  development  of  a 
complex  organism  from  an  impregnated  ovum  does  not  relieve 
the  mind  from  the  necessity  of  considering  the  final  causes 
of  the  same  history  of  development.  The  truth  is  rather 
that  increased  complexity  of  the  known  efficient  causes  only 


THE  TELEOLOGY  OF  KNOWLEDGE  499 

emphasizes  the  need  of  an  opportunity  to  regard  them  all  in 
the  light  of  the  ends  they  appear  to  serve. 

One  service  to  epistemology,  as  well,  as  to  the  current 
theology,  was  done  when  the  special  and  restricted  applica- 
tion of  the  teleological  principle  to  the  more  complex  of  the 
animal  organisms  was  so  vigorously  contested.  The  necessity 
was  emphasized  of  either  applying  the  same  principle  to  the 
entire  world  of  objects,  or  of  withdrawing  it  from  this  special 
and  restricted  sphere.  On  the  one  hand,  this  necessity  sav- 
agely shook  the  confidence  in  our  complete  ability  to  define 
within  any  sphere  all  the  ends  which  the  mind  is  warranted 
in  conceiving  as  immanent  in  the  real  being  and  actual  trans- 
actions of  things.  It  also  compelled  a  confession  that  the 
bridge  of  the  analogy  on  which  we  cross  from  our  own  limited 
and  self-contained,  most  obvious  final  purposes  to  the  tele- 
ology of  all  Reality,  brings  the  inquiring  mind  into  a  region 
where  something  more  than  eyes  trained  to  behold  the  nice- 
ties of  mechanical  adjustments  are  needed  for  vision  of  the 
whole  truth.  The  voices  that  speak,  not  only  of  moral  good- 
ness and  of  beauty,  but,  as  well,  of  the  awfully  dark  and 
tragic  side  of  Life,  must  now  be  heard.  Looking  and  listen- 
ing may  only  carry  our  cognition  up  to  the  outer  fringes  of  the 
all-comprehending  truth.  For  this  truth  has  to  do  with  the 
all-inclusive  and  ultimate  Reality.  But,  on  the  other  hand, 
the  same  attack  has  led  to  a  more  cautious  but  vastly  more 
comprehensive  extension  of  the  current  teleology,  and,  under 
it,  to  at  least  half-truths,  to  valid  intimations,  and  to  reasoned 
faiths  that  strive  to  harmonize  all  the  objects  of  our  knowl- 
edge with  the  demands  of  the  total  Self.  These  objects  thus 
become,  not  merely  interconnected  beings  and  transactions  obe- 
dient to  law  in  fact,  but  "  moments  "  in  the  Life  of  a  Being 
that  is  actually  realizing  its  own  immanent  ideas. 


CHAPTER  XYII 

ETHICAL  AND  ^STHETICAL  "MOMENTA"  OF  KNOWLEDGE 

THAT  the  more  subtle  and  profound  truths  require  for 
their  apprehension  and  elaboration  some  special  prepa- 
ration, is  a  statement  which  has  often  been  rendered  of 
practical  effect.  This  statement  is  commonly  thought  to  be 
especially  applicable  to  truths  of  ethics,  religion,  and  art ; 
but  it  has  been  by  no  means  confined  to  such  truths.  Cur- 
rent views  as  to  the  nature  of  this  preparation  of  soul  for  a 
certain  kind  of  commerce  with  Reality  —  if  we  may  in  a 
figurative  way  state  a  truth  already  discussed  —  have  differed 
greatly.  But  in  general  the  doctrine  has  been  supported  that 
the  character  of  the  preparation  must  bear  some  relation  to  the 
character  of  the  truth  which  it  is  designed  to  gain.  Thus,  for 
example,  in  case  the  truth  sought  for  belongs  to  the  sphere 
of  ethics,  the  preparation  itself  should  be  ethical.  An  ethico- 
religious  attitude  of  mind  and  turn  of  development  are  then 
considered  necessary  for  the  apprehension,  discourse,  and 
application  of  the  truths  of  religion.  Again,  philosophical 
problems  can  be  comprehended  as  problems,  and  their  ap- 
proximately satisfactory  solution  found,  only  by  one  who 
approaches  them  with  a  certain  training  and  in  an  appropri- 
ate frame  of  mind.  Did  not  Plato  make  Eros  the  sole  guide 
to  intercourse  with  the  Ideas  ?  and  did  not  the  very  word 
"  philosophy  "  originate  in  the  thought  that  its  truths  reveal 
themselves  to  those  who  seek  them  with  a  suitable  affection  ? 
Even  in  those  pursuits  of  the  physical  and  natural  sciences 


ETHICAL  AXD  ^STHETICAL  "MOMENTA"          501 

in  which  spiritual  attitudes  and  conditions  might  properly  be 
considered  of  least  account,  one  hears  much  of  the  "  scientific 
spirit,"  and  of  the  "  methods  of  research  "  which  this  spirit 
encourages  and  actually  pursues.  In  some  quarters  it  seems  to 
be  held  that  a  certain  peculiar  mental  fitness  is  essential  for 
the  observation  of  details  of  fact,  as  well  as  for  the  deepest 
insights,  highest  flights,  and  broadest  surveys,  of  the  larger 
work  of  science.  Indeed,  so  much  of  late  has  this  so-called 
"  scientific  spirit "  been  eulogized,  and  so  diligently  culti- 
vated or  zealously  assumed,  that  the  very  demand  for  it  has 
frequently  bred  a  display  of  narrowness,  bitterness,  and  con- 
tempt toward  certain  most  precious,  if  unscientific  truths. 

In  this  same  connection  might  be  noticed  the  many  positive 
errors  and  the  failures  to  reach  more  than  half-truth  that  are 
currently  ascribed  to  a  lack  of  fitness  for  some  particular 
kind  of  cognitions.  Indeed,  some  men  are  thought  to  have 
become  so  biased  toward  truth  generally  that,  as  the  popular 
saying  is,  "  They  cannot  see  it  if  they  want  to ;  "  or,  "  They 
do  not  knotv  it  when  they  see  it."  On  the  other  hand,  all 
thoughtful  critics  praise  a  certain  geniality  of  spirit,  or  hospi- 
tality of  mind  that  keeps  open  house,  and  gives  cordial  wel- 
come to  any  kind  of  truth.  When  such  authorities  express 
themselves  with  severe  caution  about  matters  to  which  they 
have  given  attention,  their  opinions  are  more  highly  esteemed 
than  are  the  most  verbose  demonstrations  of  their  contem- 
poraries ;  and  when  they  say,  "  I  know,"  even  other  experts 
of  contradictory  but  well-considered  opinions  are  brought  to 
a  respectful  pause.  Frequently,  in  the  growth  of  the  knowl- 
edge of  the  race,  have  a  few  veracious  spirits  reversed  the 
judgment  of  the  multitude. 

It  is  customary  to  account  for  such  facts  as  the  foregoing 
by  simply  pointing  out  the  influence  which  human  interests 
and  emotions  exert  over  the  opinions  of  all  men ;  and,  per- 
haps, also  by  recognizing  the  limitations  which  belong  to  the 
cognitive  opportunities  and  attainments  of  the  individual  and 


502        ETHICAL   AND  ^STHETICAL   "MOMENTA" 

of  the  race.  When  considering  the  sources  of  error,  we  took 
occasion  to  look  upon  the  matter  in  this  light.  But  there 
seem  to  be  some  much  deeper  truths  here  for  the  philosophy 
of  knowledge  to  investigate.  Epistemology  we  have  con- 
sidered as  a  doctrine  of  truth  implicating  reality,  rather  than 
as  a  physiology  and  therapeutics  of  error  and  illusion ;  and 
this  doctrine  does  not  permit  that  the  verities  of  ethics,  art, 
and  religion  should  be  looked  upon  merely  as  subjective  beliefs 
or  sentiments,  after  a  criticism  of  cognitive  faculty  has  re- 
sulted in  confining  all  knowledge  to  phenomena  of  the  senses. 
Neither  does  it  permit  the  distinction  between  "  Appearance 
and  Reality  ; "  as  though  what  men  esteem  to  be  knowledge 
were  all  illusory  and,  in  essence,  "  infected  "  and  "  self-con- 
tradictory ; "  while  reality  is  apprehensible  only  by  the  fa- 
vored few,  after  it  has  been  sublimated  and  idealized  to  the 
vanishing  point,  in  a  way  of  which  no  account  can  be  given 
that  is  intelligible  to  either  faith  or  understanding.  On  the 
contrary,  we  have  been  steadily  winning  our  way  to  the  posi- 
tion from  which  all  cognition  may  possibly  be  regarded  as  a 
species  of  conduct ;  and  from  which  all  cognitive  judgment 
implies  a  correspondence  of  the  being  and  activity  of  the  Self 
with  the  being  and  transactions  of  Reality.  We  cannot  stop 
or  draw  back  from  certain  other  suggestions  and  conclusions, 
just  at  this  point.  A  few  steps  further  on,  and  all  the  episte- 
mological  problems  which  have  been  raised  may  be  handed, 
over  to  metaphysics,  to  ethics,  to  aesthetics,  and  to  the  phi- 
losophy of  religion. 

In  the  formation  and  criticism  of  every  alleged  cognitive 
judgment,  the  entire  mind  of  the  subject,  whose  is  the  judg- 
ment, takes  part.  The  knower  is  all  in  the  knowledge ;  and  the 
cognitive  judgment  is,  for  the  time  being,  an  expression  of  his 
total  selfhood.  But  this  subject  of  knowledge,  this  knower  to 
whom  all  the  judgments  belong,  is  a  human  being,  developing 
to  maturity  in  the  possession  and  use  of  all  the  faculties  of 
man.  He  is  not  merely  a  knower  of  truth,  as  logically  deter- 


ETHICAL  AND  .ESTHETIC AL  "MOMENTA"          503 

mined  and  presented,  but  also  an  ethical,  aesthetical,  and 
religious  being.  As  is  said,  in  the  use  of  a  familiar  abstrac- 
tion, man  has  a  moral,  an  artistic,  and  a  religious,  as  well  as 
an  intellectual  nature.  But  human  nature  is  one  ;  and  man 
could  not  be  the  subject  of  conduct,  the  creator  and  critic  of 
the  beautiful,  the  maker  of,  and  believer  in,  that  Absolute 
whom  "  faith  calls  God  "  (or  even,  the  "  gods  many  and  lords 
many"),  were  he  not  also  an  intellectual  idealist  and  a  meta- 
physician. An  idealist  and  a  metaphysician,  in  all  his  cogni- 
tions, man  certainly  is.  How,  then,  can  the  reversal  of  this 
proposition,  in  some  form,  be  escaped  ?  How  can  man  know 
aught,  without  potent  influences  from  his  ethical,  aesthetical, 
and  religious  nature  ?  Must  it  not  be  that  all  human  knowl- 
edge will  be  suffused  with  influences  from  this  complex  ideal 
nature  of  man's  ?  In  a  brief  consideration  of  the  affirmative 
answer  to  these  questions,  the  epistemological  problem  comes 
into  connection  with  the  general  philosophy  of  the  ideal. 

But  we  shall  not  catch  the  true  import  of  the  forego- 
ing inquiries,  if  the  word  "  influence  "  be  understood  in  too 
external  a  way.  The  different  aspects  or  sides  of  human 
nature  do  not  stand  apart,  as  it  were,  from  the  ordinary  work- 
ing of  cognitive  faculty ;  although,  undoubtedly,  the  effort  is 
sometimes  unfortunately  made  to  treat  them  as  though  this 
were  the  case.  The  rather  must  they  all  be  considered  as 
factors,  or  "  momenta,"  essentially  present  and  effective  in 
the  integrating  process  that  gives  the  object  as  a  totality  to 
the  mind,  and  that  shapes  the  actual  synthesis  in  which  the 
cognitive  judgment  consists.  In  a  word,  whatever  be  the 
object  of  cognition,  —  stone,  tree,  star,  or  fellow-man,  —  and 
whatever  be  the  particular  character  of  the  truth  concerned,  — 
sensuous,  scientific,  practical,  or  so-called  truth  of  morals,  art, 
and  religion,  —  all  the  cognitive  "  influences  "  may  be  expected 
to  be  at  their  work.  Indeed,  the  very  effort  to  disregard  or  to 
dispel  any  of  them  can  only  end  by  introducing  them  in  some 
other  form.  It  is  not,  as  Kant  held,  by  an  illusory  logic  which 


504         ETHICAL   AND   AESTHETIC AL   "MOMENTA" 

leads  out  from  the  known,  along  an  endless  chain  of  condi- 
tions, in  search  of  the  unconditioned,  that  ethical  and  aestheti- 
cal  feelings  and  ideals  influence  the  structure  of  the  cognitive 
judgments  of  man;  but  it  is  rather  as  motifs,  suggestions, 
insights,  and  beliefs,  without  which  men  do  not,  in  fact,  come 
to  cognition  at  all. 

The  presence  and  efficiency  of  ethical  and  aesthetical  (we 
shall  no  longer  speak  of  the  religious  as  distinct)  "  mo- 
menta "  iii  man's  knowledge  of  things  may  best  be  illustrated 
by  appeal  to  certain  indefinite  and  broad  areas  of  fact.  The 
vague  and  shifty  nature  of  this  influence  is  necessarily  con- 
nected with  the  truth  that  the  concrete  facts  and  judgments 
which  express  our  ethical  and  aesthetical  ideals  are  so  little 
fixed  or  clear.  The  philosophy  of  conduct  and  of  the  beauti- 
ful is  a  reflective  treatment  of  these  facts  and  judgments  to 
determine  the  origin,  nature,  and  validity  in  reality,  of  their 
respective  ideals.  Ethics  deals  with  the  ideal  of  conduct,  with 
that  which  "  ought  to  be  "  in  human  character  and  behavior ; 
aesthetics  deals  with  the  ideal  of  the  beautiful,  with  that  which 
"  would  be,"  in  case  aesthetical  feeling  were  completely  to  be 
satisfied.  But  conduct  is  a  fact,  and  is  always  based  upon  an 
indefinite  number  of  considerations  that  concern  matters  of 
fact ;  and  the  beautiful  object,  whether  in  nature  or  in  art,  is 
itself  a  concrete  matter-of-fact.  Ethical  and  aesthetical  judg- 
ments are  also  always  psychic  facts;  as  judgments  they 
involve  and  employ  the  same  cognitive  faculties  which  all 
judgments  involve  and  employ.  So,  then,  the  real  things  and 
actual  events  to  which  ethical  and  aesthetical  ideals  are 
applied  are  the  same  things  and  the  same  events  as  those 
known  by  common  perception,  scientific  reasoning,  or  philo- 
sophical reflection. 

Now,  however,  a  most  significant  class  of  experiences  may 
be  recalled  for  criticism  from  this  point  of  view.  In  his  cog- 
nitions man  is  not  satisfied  to  consider  things  as  mere  exis- 
tences in  fact,  or  their  transactions  as  mere  occurrences  in 


ETHICAL  AND  ESTHETIC AL   "MOMENTA"         505 

fact.  He  construes  things  as  though  they  were  in  some  sort 
capable,  like  himself,  of  conduct ;  and  he  pronounces  judg- 
ment about  their  transactions  as  though  these  were  a  species 
of  conduct.  Or,  to  say  a  similar  thing  in  another  way,  we  all 
naturally  tend  to  perceive  in  things  and  in  their  behavior 
those  qualities  which  would  be  there  if  things  really  were 
themselves  subjects  regardful  of  ethical  and  aesthetical  ideals. 
What  are  the  "  real  "  things  ?  Are  they  the  things  of  every 
man's  familiar  daily  environment  and  customary  possession 
and  use  ;  or  the  things  of  his  more  elaborate  scientific  knowl- 
edge ;  or  the  same  things  as  they  appear  from  the  highest 
reflective  points  of  view  ?  From  whichever  of  these  stand- 
points one  chooses  to  regard  them,  one  prefers  to  know  them 
as  something  more  than  matter-of-fact  existences ;  and  as 
responding  more  or  less  perfectly  to  the  standards  of  ethical 
and  aesthetical  ideals.  Man  cannot  readily  cognize  things 
otherwise  than  as  somehow  responsible  to  his  own  ideals. 

This  virtual  personification  of  things,  which  goes  so  far  as  to 
attribute  to  them  not  only  life  and  intelligence,  but  also  quasi- 
morally  good  or  bad  behavior,  and  beauty  or  ugliness  in  them- 
selves, has  frequently  been  explained  on  purely  psychological 
grounds.  To  it,  as  thus  explained,  the  origin  of  some,  or  per- 
haps of  all  the  forms  of  religion  has  been  ascribed ;  and  with 
a  certain  degree  of  historical  correctness,  if  only  the  terms 
employed  are  properly  selected  and  correctly  understood. 
But,  as  a  rule,  it  is  now  held  that  all  such  anthropomor- 
phism is  the  peculiarity  of  childish,  or  savage,  undeveloped 
minds,  and  is  destined  to  retreat  and  disappear  before  the  more 
scientific  and  verifiable  knowledge  of  what  things  really  are. 
It  is  not  our  present  interest  to  determine  precisely  what  are 
the  limits  which  truth  and  reality  put  upon  this  psychological 
tendency  to  personify  things.  The  fact  to  be  noted  which  has 
a  profound  epistemological  significance  is  this :  the  banishing 
of  superstition  and  the  growth  of  physical  science  have  not 
essentially  changed  the  fundamental  tendencies  or  the  actual 


506          ETHICAL  AXD  ^STHETICAL   "MOMENTA" 

operations  of  human  cognitive  faculty.  Things  continue  to 
be  known  only  under  a  potent  determination  to  make  them 
conform  to  certain  ideals.  The  ethical  and  the  sesthetical 
"  momenta,"  however  diminished  in  naivetd  and  obtrusiveness, 
are  not  less  truly  present  in  almost  all  classes  of  the  so-called 
cognitive  judgments  of  mankind. 

The  necessity  for  regarding  the  being  and  action  of  things 
from  certain  quasi,  if  not  completely,  ethical  and  sesthetical 
standpoints,  and  for  affirming  ethical  and  aesthetical  qualifica- 
tions of  them,  follows  as  a  corollary,  in  some  sort,  from  the 
argument  of  the  last  chapter.  In  this  chapter  it  was  shown 
that  the  application  of  the  teleological  idea  is  almost,  if  not 
quite,  coextensive  with  cognition  itself.  But  the  essence  of 
ethics  and  of  esthetics  is  teleological.  The  former  is  indeed 
the  study  of  conduct  as  related  to  a  consciously  accepted  ideal. 
And  doubtless  it  is  the  recognition  of  this  limit  —  "  consciously 
accepted  "  —  which,  in  large  measure,  accounts  for  the  common 
readiness  of  even  the  most  cultivated  minds  to  consider  the 
things  and  events  of  the  physical  world  as  really  coming  under 
the  category  of  the  aesthetically  beautiful  rather  than  under  the 
category  of  the  morally  good.  On  the  other  hand,  there  can  be 
little  doubt  that  the  very  conception  of  final  purpose,  even  when 
it  is  rendered  as  negative  as  possible  by  abstraction  of  all 
thought  from  a  consciousness  which  accepts  the  end  and  ren- 
ders effective  the  adaptation  of  the  means  to  its  actual  realiza- 
tion, leads  the  mind  to  ways  of  perception  and  of  thought  that 
are  scarcely  separable  from  the  distinctively  ethical  and  aesthet- 
ical. We  prefer,  however,  to  illustrate  the  propositions  of  this 
chapter,  in  as  great  independence  as  is  possible  of  the  cognate 
truth  that  all  knowledge  is  teleological. 

The  character  of  the  feeling  with  which  men  instinctively 
regard  those  events  of  nature  which  affect  their  interests  most 
immediately  is  instructive  on  this  point.  It  is  not  the  super- 
stitious savage,  or  the  pious  civilized  farmer  alone  who  when 
these  events,  for  example,  result  in  the  destruction  of  his  dwell- 


ETHICAL  AND  ^STHETICAL  "MOMENTA"         507 

ing,  his  herds,  or  his  crops,  summons  them  to  the  bar  of  reason 
to  stand  judgment  pronounced  on  ethical  grounds.  The  sen- 
timent of  a  grievance  that  is  something  more  than  grief,  of  a 
wrong  received  that  needs  to  be  righted  in  some  other  than  a 
blind  and  mechanical  fashion,  is  not  only  native  but  also  well- 
nigh  ineradicable  with  man  under  such  circumstances.  He  is 
scarcely  free  to  choose  between  an  outbreaking  and  a  deeper, 
suppressed  resentment  that  is  equally  unintelligible  ;  he  must 
rather  choose  between  some  feeling  of  resentment  and  the 
conquest  of  that  feeling  by  the  sentiment  of  resignation.  But 
neither  resentment  nor  resignation  would  appear  to  be  a 
proper  attitude  of  mind  toward  any  mere  matter-of-fact.  It  is 
so ;  that  is  the  only  judgment  appropriate  to  be  pronounced 
with  a  complete  freedom  from  ethical  feeling.  Pain  and 
sorrow  are  the  feelings  which  recognize  such  mere  matters- 
of-fact  for  all  that  they  are  worth.  As  to  meaning,  or  worth 
beyond,  how  can  one  think  or  speak  ?  In  vain,  however,  does 
Epicurus  scoff  at  the  thought  that  the  gods  concern  them- 
selves in  things  like  these.  In  vain  does  the  fatalistic  poet 
bid  us  lift  not  our  hands  to  Heaven, — • 

"  for  IT 
As  impotently  rolls  as  you  or  I." 

And  it  is  not  the  atheist,  if  such  there  really  be,  who  is  least 
likely  to  shake  an  imprecatory  fist  toward  the  stars,  when  the 
fateful  lightning  or  flood  has  singled  him  from  among  his 
fellows  for  its  work  of  destruction.  On  the  other  hand,  is  he 
the  wiser  man  who  succeeds  in  suppressing  all  movements  of 
a  genial  and  grateful  spirit  toward  the  "  good  dame  Nature  " 
when  her  hand  has  just  been  extraordinarily  bountiful  to  him  ? 
Or  is  it  altogether  evident  that  the  judgment  which  virtually 
affirms  the  event  to  be  an  act  of  goodness  on  her  part  is 
squarely  contradictory  of  the  most  recent  physico-chemical 
explanations  of  the  same  event? 

To  consider  an  example  :  What  used  to  be  called  "  natural 
theology  "  has  no  harder  task  at  present  than  the  recoucilia- 


508          ETHICAL  AND  AESTHETIC AL  "MOMENTA" 

tion  of  the  facts  of  modern  bacteriology  with  its  traditional 
doctrine  of  the  goodness  of  God.  Or,  to  change  the  point  of 
view  to  the  more  scientific  and  philosophical,  What  shall 
one  say  in  answer  to  the  problem  afforded  by  the  attempt  to 
give  a  meaning  to  such  facts  as  observation  reveals  ?  Innu- 
merable species  of  animal  and  plant  life  —  microscopic,  in- 
conceivably prolific,  exceedingly  obscure  as  to  their  habitat 
and  their  modes  of  propagation  and  of  procedure,  inescap- 
able—  fill  the  air,  the  water,  the  soil,  and  support  their 
life  upon  the  elements  of  every  organic  structure  belonging 
to  the  physical  life  of  man.  Of  what  worth  are  they ;  and 
how  can  their  existence  be  justified  in  the  great  scheme  of 
natural  forces  and  laws  ?  But  such  a  question  as  this  shows 
the  inevitable  influences  upon  man's  way  of  viewing  natural 
things  and  events  that  have  their  origin  in  the  ethical  and 
sesthetical  points  of  view.  For  if  bacteria  are  to  be  looked 
upon  as  mere  matters-of-fact,  we  cannot  ask  to  have  a  ques- 
tion of  value  concerning  them  solved  so  as  to  seem  to  justify 
their  existence.  As  to  "  rights "  of  existence,  there  is,  in 
fact,  no  possible  question  to  be  raised.  These  things  exist ; 
and  they  deal  disease  and  death  to  man ;  and  there  ends  his 
cognitive  judgments  regarding  them. 

But  now  we  are  compelled  to  recognize  another  fact  of  ex- 
perience, and  this  is  the  pleasure  with  which  the  announcement 
is  made  and  heard,  that  harmless  bacteria  are  much  more  abun- 
dant than  are  the  deadly  kinds.  Nay,  more  and  better  news  is 
brought  to  us  from  the  researches  of  field  and  of  laboratory. 
These  minute  beings  are  the  makers  of  valuable  ferments,  and 
the  causes  of  agreeable  and  wholesome  flavors.  We  are  even 
assured  that  without  the  silent,  unobserved  services,  through 
untold  centuries  and  in  absolutely  inconceivable  numbers,  of 
such  lowly  forms  of  life,  the  higher  forms,  whose  crown  is 
found  in  man,  could  never  have  come  into  existence.  The  mind 
has  now  something  more  than  a  mere  increase  of  informa- 
tion on  matters-of-fact.  It  experiences  a  significant  satisfac- 


ETHICAL  AND  .ESTHETIC AL   "MOMENTA"         509 

tion  of  its  demand  that  Nature  shall  reveal  herself  to  it  as 
not  all  bad,  or  "  half  bad,"  but  as  capable  of  a  deeper  wisdom 
and  a  more  profound  beneficence,  it  is  likely,  than  that  which 
is  apparent  upon  the  surface  of  things.  Be  the  argument 
valid  or  not,  this  does  not  signify  much  when  one  contem- 
plates it  from  the  present  point  of  view.  For  we  are  trying 
to  understand  the  nature  of  knowledge  itself ;  and  such  facts 
of  human  experience  lead  us  in  a  new  way  to  see  how  deep- 
set  in  the  activity  of  the  mind  is  its  tendency  to  regard  things 
as  somehow  responsible  beings,  and  their  doings  as  though 
they  were  a  species  of  conduct  that  might  properly  be  re- 
garded from  ethical  and  sesthetical  points  of  view. 

Undoubtedly,  the  influence  of  ethical  feeling  and  ideas 
upon  the  cognitive  judgments  of  men,  as  applied  to  the  being 
and  transactions  of  things,  is  much  more  obvious  when  they 
are  dealing  with  Nature  "in  the  large,"  as  it  were.  Her 
general  forces,  and  the  important  events  they  produce  within 
the  sphere  of  human  living,  seem  more  properly  to  be  held  re- 
sponsible for  some  kind  of  conformity  or  subservience  to 
ethical  ideals.  Thus  it  is  not  in  poetry  alone,  or  by  senti- 
mentalists merely,  that  "  She "  is  virtually  pronounced  re- 
morseless and  cruel,  or  bountiful  and  beneficent,  according 
to  the  varying  relations  which  physical  objects  and  forces 
sustain  to  human  interests  and  to  human  endeavors.  Per- 
haps it  would  not  much  exaggerate  the  case  to  say  that 
modern  science,  with  its  large  extension  of  the  principle  of 
mechanism,  has  nevertheless  been  scarcely  less  anxious  to 
justify  the  ways  of  Nature  before  quasi-ethical  consciousness 
than  was  formerly  the  theologian  to  obtain  for  Divine  Provi- 
dence a  similar  fair  reputation.  But  so  far  as  the  theory  of 
knowledge  is  concerned,  what  difference  does  it  make  whether 
it  is  a  theodicy  or  a  "  physiodicy "  (if  such  a  word  may  be 
coined)  that  is  secretly  had  in  mind,  when  natural  events  are 
brought  to  judgment?  If  we  cannot  avoid  detecting  a  ten- 
dency to  judge  the  system  of  natural  objects  and  events  as 


510          ETHICAL   AND   ESTHETIC AL   "MOMENTA" 

though  it  were  arranged  so  as  to  make  its  messengers  out  of 
the  wind,  and  its  ministers  out  of  flames  of  fire,  in  order  to 
control  the  weal  or  the  woe  of  man,  the  selection  of  a  word  to 
spell  with  a  capital,  as  the  Power  effecting  such  arrangement, 
does  not  signify  an  essential  difference  for  our  epistemologi- 
cal  doctrine.  For  the  present,  let  IT  be  called  Nature,  the 
Absolute,  or  God. 

The  reasons  why  men  generally  feel  more  hesitancy 
about  attributing  ethical  qualifications  to  single  natural  ob- 
jects or  to  events  that  seem  trifling,  are  not  difficult  to  dis- 
cover. It  is  only  that  action  which  appears  to  have  a  meaning 
when  contemplated  in  the  light  of  certain  primitive  and 
unique  forms  of  feeling,  to  which  ethical  judgment  applies. 
Conduct,  and  not  mere  action,  is  felt  and  declared  to  be  right 
or  wrong,  worthy  of  approbation  and  meritorious,  or  the  op- 
posite. Things,  therefore,  when  regarded  merely  as  having 
qualities  or  forms  of  being,  and  not  as  doing  anything  to 
man,  are  not  entitled  to  judgment  under  any  of  the  ethical 
categories.  Moreover,  when  men  become  acquainted  with 
things  in  action,  and  even  as  doing  that  which  most  seriously 
affects  human  well-being,  the  things  appear  for  the  most 
part  as  the  helpless  instruments  of  forces  that  lie  outside  of 
themselves  and  which  they  cannot  oppose,  but  must  perforce 
obey.  Even  the  most  ignorant  savage  does  not  charge  to 
the  account  of  the  poisoned  arrow  from  the  bow  of  his  enemy 
his  own  approaching  death,  in  a  quasi-ethical  way ;  but 
the  destruction  wrought  by  the  bolt  that  falls  from  heaven 
impresses  him  as  a  quite  different  species  of  action.  Even 
the  most  enlightened  modern  believer  in  Providence  thinks  of 
the  cyclone  itself  as  standing  in  a  different  relation  to  God 
from  that  sustained  by  the  particular  brick  or  beam  which 
has  been  "  driven  by  "  the  cyclone  upon  the  head  of  some 
member  of  his  family. 

It  would  be  a  mistake,  however,  to  suppose  that  what  have 
been  referred  to  as  "ethical  momenta"  in  the  cognitive  pro- 


ETHICAL  AND  AESTHETIC AL   "MOMENTA"          511 

cesses  of  man's  mind,  have  no  modifying  influence  upon  the 
cognitive  judgments  that  apply  to  particular  and  even  minute 
things.  The  presence  of  this  same  influence,  for  example, 
is  powerfully  felt  whenever  the  question  arises  as  to  the 
matter-of-fact  origin,  nature,  and  functions  of  some  member 
of  any  complex  organism.  The  difficulty  which  the  mind 
finds  in  accepting  the  suggestion,  or  even  the  seemingly  well- 
founded  conclusion,  that  any  member  of  such  an  organism 
has  no  function,  or  that  its  function  is  not  beneficent  with 
reference  to  the  total  organism,  does  not  seem  to  be  wholly 
a  deduction  from  our  scientific  knowledge  as  to  the  nature 
and  conditions  of  life  in  general ;  it  is  rather  a  quasi-ethical 
and  sesthetical  postulate.  The  feelings  of  satisfaction  with 
which  observers  contemplate  the  services  of  the  cilia  in  keep- 
ing clear  the  respiratory  passages,  or  of  the  saliva  and  the 
gastric  juices  in  rendering  poisonous  substances  innocuous, 
or  of  the  phagocytes  in  actually  surrounding  and  counteract- 
ing foreign  and  deadly  germs  in  the  circulation,  are  not 
wholly  born  of  the  logical  faculties.  He  who  refrains  from 
adding  to  the  cognitive  judgments  which  affirm,  "  That  is 
what  they  are,"  and  "  That  is  how  they  behave,"  the  other 
judgments,  "  That  is  what  they  are  for,"  and  "  Bravo ! "  or 
"  Well  done  !  "  suppresses  a  tendency  of  his  own  nature  which 
is  as  deeply  seated  and  as  sure  to  demand  its  satisfactions  as 
is  the  desire  for  knowledge  of  fact  and  of  law.  It  belongs,  how- 
ever, to  the  metaphysics  of  ethics  and  to  the  philosophy  of 
religion  to  consider  the  more  comprehensive  and  profound 
problems  as  to  the  nature  of  Reality  which  are  suggested  by 
the  influence  of  man's  moral  feeling  and  ethical  ideas  over  his 
cognitive  judgments.  Our  analysis  thus  far  has  shown  that 
this  influence  is  rather  a  tendency  than  a  compulsion.  It  has 
also  partially  evinced  the  truth  that  in  order  to  render  this 
tendency  satisfactory  to  the  cognitive  faculties  as  a  whole, 
the  conception  of  that  Reality  whose  being  and  transactions 
these  faculties  aim  truthfully  to  represent  must  itself  be  sub- 


512         ETHICAL   AND  ^ESTHETICAL   "MOMENTA" 

ject  to  expansion,  to  purification,  and  to  progressive  elevation 
in  the  direction  of  the  supreme  Ideals  of  man. 

JEsthetical  consciousness  differs  from  ethical  conscious- 
ness in  some  important  particulars.  The  influence  which  the 
former  exerts  upon  our  cognitive  judgments,  and  the  class  of 
cognitions  in  which  this  influence  terminates,  are  correspond- 
ingly different.  It  is  conduct  that  moral  feeling  approhates 
or  blames;  but  aesthetical  feeling  leads  the  mind  to  judge 
beautiful  (or  the  opposite)  both  the  quiescent  being,  or  "  still 
life,"  and  also  the  behavior  and  interaction  of  tilings.  Whether 
that  which  does  not  at  least  suggest  some  form  of  Life  in 
action  can  awaken  aesthetical  feeling,  and  be  pronounced  beau- 
tiful, need  not  be  discussed  in  this  connection.  But  we  may 
certainly  say  of  some  things,  considered  as  removed  from  causal 
connection  with  other  things,  and  as  not  affecting  our  personal 
interests,  "  They  are  (or  are  not)  beautiful."  Schopenhauer,1 
in  a  highly  exaggerated  and  largely  erroneous  but  effective 
way,  has  described  at  length  the  nature  of  the  sesthetical 
judgment.  It  may  be  pronounced  as  the  conclusion  of  a  pro- 
cess of  perception  ;  and  it  has  the  objectivity  and  universality 
of  a  cognitive  judgment.  I  know  the  object  as  beautiful,  with 
as  much  appearance  of  immediateness  and  indubitableness  as 
I  know  it  to  have  certain  spatial  or  other  qualifications.  Un- 
doubtedly even  sesthetical  judgment  is,  quoad  judgment,  sub- 
jective ;  but  so  is  every  form  of  a  cognitive  judgment.  It  is 
suffused  with  a  peculiar  form  of  feeling  ;  and  when  the  effort 
is  made  to  trace  its  origin,  this  effort  would  seem  to  end 
in  merely  recognizing  the  justification  which  the  feeling  itself 
.supplies.  That  is,  the  ultimate  grounds  on  which  assthetical 
judgments  appear  to  repose  for  their  validity  are  to  be  found 
in  the  aesthetical  feelings  awakened  in  us  by  certain  classes  of 
objects.  But,  on  the  other  hand,  the  feelings  themselves  have 
just  this  peculiarity,  that  they  seem  to  us  to  warrant,  and  even 
to  compel,  a  judgment  that  is  not  subjective.  The  aesthetical 

1  World  as  Will  and  Idea  (English  translation),  i.,  pp.  219  f.,  and  iii.,  pp.  173  £. 


ETHICAL   AND  ^ESTHETICAL  "MOMENTA"          513 

judgment  does  not  simply  declare,  "I  feel  certain  peculiar 
affective  changes  in  my  consciousness;"  but  "The  Thing 
over  there  is  (or  is  not)  a  beautiful  tiling."  ^Esthetics  is 
the  branch  of  philosophy  which  critically  examines  the  origin 
and  nature  of  this  class  of  judgments,  and  the  peculiar  feelings 
which  the  judgments  manifest ;  its  metaphysical  problem 
concerns  the  nature  of  Reality  as  known  in  this  way.  Epis- 
temology,  however,  cannot  avoid  noting  the  significant  exist- 
ence of  the  entire  class  of  such  judgments.  That  men's 
contemplative  perception  of  things  results  in  ascribing  aesthet- 
ical  qualifications  to  things,  in  the  form  of  the  most  confident 
cognitive  judgments,  is  an  important  fact  for  epistemology  and 
its  correlative  view  of  Reality  ;  and  that  men  do  make  such 
judgments  —  confident,  objective,  and  liable  to  be  employed 
both  as  points  of  starting  and  as  goals  to  be  reached  by 
endeavor  —  does  not  admit  of  doubt 

It  is  commonly  supposed  that  the  body  of  cognitions  which 
science  and  philosophy  support  is  uninfluenced  by  aesthetical 
considerations ;  that  its  so-called  truths  are  solely  matters  of 
observed  fact  and  of  conclusions  arrived  at  by  following 
strictly  logical  processes.  We  do  not  believe,  however,  that 
the  case  is  so.  The  body  of  scientific  truth  is  a  constitution 
in  which  considerations  of  order,  harmony,  symmetry,  and 
adaptability  are  supremely  significant;  and  philosophy  finds 
its  very  life  and  its  ultimate  justification  in  the  reflective 
treatment  of  ideals.  Now,  the  conceptions  of  order,  harmony, 
symmetry,  and  adaptability,  and  the  nature  of  any  ideal,  are 
themselves  such  as  to  awaken  strong  aesthetical  feelings ;  and 
these  feelings  can  by  no  possibility  be  wholly  kept  apart  from 
those  observations  and  from  that  work  of  generalizing  in  which 
the  so-called  laws  of  science  and  the  speculative  solution  of 
the  problems  of  philosophy  have  their  rise.  The  student  of 
physical  science,  as  a  rule,  does  not  understand  himself,  how- 
ever expert  he  may  become  in  the  understanding  of  nature. 
As  an  aesthetical  being,  he  loves  and  admires  order,  harmony, 

33 


514          ETHICAL   AND   ^STHETICAL  "MOMENTA  " 

symmetry,  and  adaptability  ;  as  an  aesthetical  being,  and  not 
as  a  purely  logical  being,  he  also  finds  in  nature  what  he  loves 
and  admires.  The  whole  history  of  the  physical  and  natural 
sciences  would  on  examination  be  found  replete  with  examples 
to  illustrate  this  truth :  the  scientifically  ideal  and  the  cestheti- 
cal  qualifications  of  nature  always  have  the  presumption  on 
their  side.  Order  rather  than  disorder,  some  sort  of  harmony 
and  symmetry  —  which  may  be  all  the  more  beautiful  and 
significant  if  the  less  obvious,  superficial,  and  easy  to  be 
found  —  rather  than  the  opposites  of  these,  are  the  assumed 
ends  and  ideals  of  the  system  of  physical  beings  and  events 
which  physical  science  proclaims.  It  confidently  relies  on 
finding  these  ends  and  ideals  realized  in  nature ;  but  the 
warrant  for  this  confidence  does  not  exist  solely  in  the  state 
of  the  case  as  bare  matter-of-fact. 

For  an  illustration  we  may  turn  to  modern  astronomy :  By 
far  the  greater  majority  of  the  stellar  universe,  so  far  as  this 
science  has  any  information  from  observed  facts,  are  behaving 
in  the  most  disorderly,  unharmonious,  and  meaningless  fashion. 
Millions  of  masses  of  matter,  void  of  any  life  that  could  follow 
a  pattern  known  to  us,  are  rushing  through  space  in  all  direc- 
tions and  with  an  indefinite  number  of  velocities,  paying  no 
attention  to  each  other,  and  seeking  no  end,  —  doing  nothing 
in  fact  that  has  conceivable  significance  or  use.  Yet  the 
steadfast  faith  of  the  astronomer  proclaims  the  order  and  har- 
mony of  the  stars  ;  and  his  soul  kindles  with  a  feeling  of  the 
sublimity  and  beauty  of  the  celestial  scenery  as  he  applies  his 
trained  eye  to  telescope  or  heliometer.  Is  the  proclamation 
based  merely  on  inference  from  the  facts  ?  Do  the  feelings 
arise  at  the  call  simply  of  a  cogent  logic  ?  We  do  not  believe 
that  either  of  these  questions  can  be  answered  affirmatively. 
Or  again :  There  is  current  just  now  a  highly  elaborate  and 
largely  metaphysical  doctrine  of  evolution  as  applied  to  the 
known  facts  of  biology.  This  doctrine  is  exceedingly  optimis- 
tic in  its  view  of  the  significance,  the  tendencies,  and  the  issue 


ETHICAL  AND  ^STHETICAL  "MOMENTA"          515 

to  be  expected  from  the  facts.  That  which  is  better  is,  on  the 
whole,  winning  the  day ;  the  way  is  long  and  weary  indeed, 
and  it  is  well  strewn  with  slime  and  blood.  But  the  end  is  to 
justify  the  way.  And  the  same  Nature  which  appears  relent- 
less, cruel,  and  hideous  in  certain  aspects  of  the  descriptive 
history  of  animal  life,  is,  after  all,  believed  to  be  striving  to- 
ward a  goal  that  has  an  ideal  value  sufficient  to  pay  all  the 
costs  and  more  of  the  passage.  Now,  on  what  basis  is  this  so 
optimistic  theory  of  evolution  actually  placed  ?  Is  this  basis 
simply  what  is  known  of  observed  facts,  and  what  may  be 
concluded  by  fair  but  strict  logical  inference  from  observed 
facts  ?  Or  is  not  every  form  of  the  evolution  theory,  so  far  as 
it  is  pronouncedly  optimistic,  largely  derived  from  aesthetical 
demands  which  arise  in  the  nature  of  biologists  themselves  ? 
What  kind  of  theoretic  handling  these  same  facts  and  laws 
admit  of,  if  treated  in  their  relations  to  our  human  conceptions 
of  a  good  to  be  realized,  becomes  apparent  when  the  decidedly 
pessimistic  temperament  takes  them  in  hand.  The  optimist 
is  ready  to  ascribe  the  pessimist's  conclusions  in  such  a  case 
to  the  temperament  of  the  investigator.  Doubtless  the  charge 
is  largely  just.  But  the  very  point  at  issue  is  whether  the 
prevailing  optimistic  conclusions  are  not  themselves  largely 
a  matter  of  "temperament,"  or  rather  whether  they  do  not 
need  for  their  full  explanation  the  admission  that  sesthetical 
influences  enter  into  the  cognitive  judgments  of  the  natural 
sciences  in  a  very  prevalent  and  pervasive  way. 

If  science  seems  always  impelled  to  give  more  or  less  of  an 
ideal  construction  to  the  facts  of  the  physical  world,  philos- 
ophy is  from  its  very  nature  definitively  and  consciously  an 
effort  to  harmonize  all  human  experience  in  terms  of  the 
ideal.  It  starts  indeed  from  matters-of-fact, — from  what  is, 
and  is  known  to  be.  But,  inasmuch  as  philosophy  begins 
at  once  to  inquire  after  the  meaning  and  the  larger  and 
more  intimate  and  ultimate  relations  of  what  is,  it  early  de- 
fines its  object  of  pursuit  as  belonging  to  the  World  of  the 


516          ETHICAL   AND  ^ESTHETICAL   "MOMENTA" 

Idea.  As  every  student  of  its  history  knows,  its  most  seduc- 
tive temptation  —  indeed,  the  temptation  to  which  all  the 
greatest  speculative  thinkers  have  probably  in  some  measure 
yielded,  so  much  as  to  sway  them  from  the  truth  —  is  to  force 
the  facts  which  experience  presents  and  guarantees  as  facts, 
whether  of  cognition  or  of  existence,  into  conformity  with 
a3sthetical  ideals.  Philosophy  indeed  grows  quite  as  much  out 
of  the  a3sthetical  as  out  of  the  more  purely  intellectual  nature 
of  man.  This  is  to  the  discredit  neither  of  its  truthfulness 
nor  of  its  value.  For  truth  discovers  itself  to  the  sesthetical 
nature ;  and  man  does  not  live  by  bread  alone. 

Perhaps  no  more  impressive  illustration  of  the  extent  to 
which  the  influence  of  gesthetical  considerations  can  be  carried 
in  the  treatment  of  a  philosophical  problem  can  be  found  than 
that  afforded  by  the  "  Critique  of  Pure  Reason  "  itself.  This 
illustration  is  all  the  more  impressive  on  account  of  two  con- 
siderations :  For,  first,  the  problem  itself  is  of  a  character 
which  does  not  take  the  critic  far  afield  into  tangled  thickets 
of  obscure  and  contested  facts,  or  out  upon  the  foggy  and 
limitless  ocean  of  ontological  mysteries  ;  it  only  involves  the 
analysis  of  processes  of  cognition  with  a  view  to  determine 
their  laws  and  formal,  subjective  characteristics.  All  tempta- 
tion to  mysticism  would  seem  to  be  removed  on  Kant's  part 
by  his  restricting  the  problem  to  the  legal  and  formal  aspect 
of  knowledge ;  since  it  is  in  the  £raws-subjective  and  ontologi- 
cal aspect  of  the  same  problem,  in  the  origin  and  nature  of 
"  that  which  is  given,"  that  the  realm  of  mystery  chiefly 
seems  to  lie. 

But,  second,  no  critic  could  easily  affect  a  method  and  a 
style  more  high-and-dry  in  its  claims  to  apodictic  certainty  on 
grounds  of  its  strictly  logical  and  unemotional  procedure  than 
that  of  the  author  of  the  "  Critique  of  Pure  Reason  "  in  this 
particular  work.  Rarely  during  its  several  hundred  pages 
does  a  sentence  glow  with  the  heat  of  even  suppressed  ethical 
and  aesthetical  emotion.  Kant  appears  determined  to  use  the 


ETHICAL  AND  ^STHETICAL   "MOMENTA"         517 

dissecting-knife  upon  the  whole  body  of  human  knowledge,  to 
let  out  its  life-blood  before  our  eyes,  and  to  display  its  skeleton 
bared  of  all  fair  clothing  of  sensitive  flesh ;  but  he  will  do  this 
grimly,  and  as  a  matter  of  devotion  to  mere  truth,  without 
influence  from  aesthetical  considerations.  He  will  not  once 
let  his  eye  pity,  or  his  arm  stretch  out  to  save.  In  the  text  of 
the  body  of  his  critical  work  it  is  only  occasionally  (for  the 
most  part  in  the  second  edition)  that  he  reminds  us  of  his 
ulterior  design  to  "  make  room  "  for  faith ;  occasionally  indeed 
he  does  appear  to  drop  a  sentence  or  two  which  shows  the 
"state  of  his  heart"  toward  the  problems  of  God,  Freedom, 
and  Immortality.  Yet  the  final  outcome  of  the  Kantian  criti- 
cal thinking  does  not  disprove  the  saying,  "  Das  Pathos  ist 
der  Grundton  des  ganzen  Daseins  —  des  Weltalls."  Even  in 
its  more  purely  destructive  work,  and  in  spite  of  Kant's  own 
Avarning  against  letting  desire  and  imagination  run  away  with 
his  logic  (lest  he  might  himself  become  a  Vernunftkunstler'), 
he  could  not  keep  his  own  skirts  clear  of  blame. 

We  believe  it  can  be  shown  that  the  entire  architectonic  of 
the  "  Critique  of  Pure  Reason,"  as  well  as  the  subordinate 
divisions  and  conclusions  which  are  panged  under  the  main 
titles,  is  much  influenced  by  its  author's  assthetical  ideals.  It 
embodies  preconceived  views  as  to  what  sort  of  an  harmonious 
and  symmetrical  structure  human  reason  ought  to  be,  quite  as 
much  as  the  actual  finding,  in  the  name  of  either  sound  psy- 
chology or  valid  epistemological  analysis,  of  what  human 
reason  is.  The  reader  who  understands  may  note  everywhere 
the  stupendous  products  of  Kant's  fondness  for  effective 
parallel  and  contrast,  and  of  his  confidence  in  his  ability  to 
embody  his  own  ideal  of  a  Reason  that  should  be  equipped 
with  a  perfectly  symmetrical  and  harmonious  outfit  of  original 
faculties.  The  picture  which  he  draws  of  such  a  system  of 
faculties  cannot  be  recognized  as  coinciding  throughout,  or  even 
in  many  most  important  particulars,  with  the  reason  actually 
possessed  and  used  by  the  race  of  living  men.  Thus  the  im- 


518         ETHICAL   AND  ESTHETIC AL   "  MOMENTA  " 

pression  made  by  a  careful  study  of  this  picture  corresponds 
to  that  produced  by  an  aesthetically  great  creative  composi- 
tion, rather  than  to  that  of  a  portrait  true  to  life.  Very 
few  are  the  students  of  the  "  Critique  of  Pure  Reason " 
who  finish  it  with  the  feeling  of  conviction,  "  I  have  seen 
my  own  face  as  in  a  glass,"  rather  than  with  a  feeling  of 
admiration  and  wonder  at  its  author's  art  in  dramatizing 
human  nature  in  such  a  lofty  and  interesting  though  unreal 
way.  A  reason  actually  constructed  after  the  pattern  of 
Kant's  architectonic  would  surely  be  a  most  marvellous 
piece  of  mechanism  ;  and  since  everything  necessary  to  cogni- 
tion is  strictly  determined  a  priori  by  this  pattern  (with 
the  insignificant  exception  of  what  is  given  as  content  of 
sensation),  we  may  ask :  How  could  such  a  reason  fall 
into  any  erroneous  judgments  ?  But,  on  the  other  hand, 
how  could  it  attain  to  any  truth,  in  the  meaning  of  that 
word  which  interests  the  hearts  and  binds  the  consciences 
of  all  men  ?  For  whatever  may  be  the  last  word  of  criti- 
cism, the  hearts  and  consciences  of  men  revolt  against  the 
conclusions  of  a  sceptical  idealism ;  and  finally,  the  question 
arises  whether,  in  the  critical  endeavor  to  clear  away  all 
mystery  from  the  primary  fact  of  knowledge  by  an  analysis 
of  intellectual  faculty,  the  critic  is  not  bound  to  pay  tribute 
to  his  own  aesthetical  and  ethical  tendencies  in  another  and 
no  less  uncritical  way. 

For  the  fundamental  epistemological  truth  seems  to  be  that 
the  rational  order  of  cognition  proceeds  from  the  concept  of 
Self,  with  its  numerous  ethical  and  cesthetical  impressions 
and  ideas,  to  the  more  barren  and  less  certainly  valid  concept 
of  a  Nature  stripped  of  such  impressions  and  ideas.  But  the 
latter  concept,  instead  of  being  valid  for  Reality,  because  built 
upon  verifiable  facts  that  can  stand  apart  from  the  conception 
of  a  conscious  Self,  and  so  account  for  the  latter  by  a  process 
of  aggregation  or  development,  is  itself  derived  from  the  latter 
by  a  process  of  abstraction  and  progressive  separation  of  dif- 


ETHICAL  AND  ^ESTHETICAL  "MOMENTA"         519 

ferent,  seemingly  separable  "  momenta."  *  At  any  rate  we  saw- 
that  this  form  of  procedure  takes  place  in  all  that  application 
of  the  principle  of  sufficient  reason  to  the  world  of  things  which 
the  development  of  the  physical  sciences  requires.  Nor  is  it 
strange  that  the  spirit  of  man,  in  spite  of  all  warnings  to  the 
contrary,  and  notwithstanding  a  never-ceasing  series  of  mis- 
apprehensions and  errors  brought  about  in  this  way,  persists 
in  regarding  the  cosmic  mechanism  as  the  mask  or  hull 
behind  and  underneath  which  spiritual  processes  are  working. 
Whatever  term  be  employed,  —  whether  it  be  the  term 
"  Nature  "  as  used  by  the  physicist,  the  "  Absolute "  of  the 
philosopher,  or  the  "  God  "  of  the  theologian  and  the  religious 
devotee, — ethical  and  aesthetical  feelings  and  ideals  will  make 
themselves  manifest  in  the  final  construction  which  human 
thought  gives  to  Reality.  And,  indeed,  the  "  momenta "  of 
this  character  which  enter  into  the  very  essence  of  our  cog- 
nitive judgments  are  such  and  so  many  that  it  is  doubtful 
whether  they  can  be  removed,  and  leave  to  those  judgments 
the  semblance  of  being  the  product  of  human  cognitive  facul- 
ties. Man's  own  life  of  final  purpose,  of  conduct  directed 
with  reference  to  a  consciously  accepted  ideal,  and  of  admir- 
ing satisfaction  in  what  appears  to  him  under  the  conceptions 
of  order,  harmony,  symmetry,  etc.,  suffuses  his  judgments  as 
to  the  being  and  transactions  of  the  really  existent  World. 
He  knows  that  he  himself  is  actually  influenced  by  ideals  of 
conduct  and  of  beauty;  he  is  constantly  inclined, and  even  im- 
pelled, to  know  things  as  though  they  too  were  influenced  in 
an  analogous  way.  In  a  word,  the  Universe  is  known,  so  far 
as  known  at  all,  rather  as  an  Idea  that  seems  to  give  true 
answers,  though  meagre,  obscure,  and  mysterious  in  their 
deepest  meanings,  to  the  whole  soul  of  man.  And  indeed,  if 
the  highest  knowledge  is  a  kind  of  commerce  of  Spirit  with 
our  spirits,  how  otherwise  should  the  fact  rightly  seem  to  be  ? 

1  Compare  the  remarks  of  Wtmdt  on  "  Die  Natur  als  Vorstufe  des  Geistes," 
in  his  "  System  der  Philosophic,"  p.  559. 


520         ETHICAL   AND   ^ESTHETICAL   "MOMENTA" 

But  now  the  question  arises  as  to  the  truthfulness  of  those 
forms  of  mental  representation  that  stand  under  the  influence 
of  aesthetical  and  ethical  considerations,  and  of  the  cogni- 
tive judgments  into  which  sesthetical  and  ethical  "  momenta  " 
most  abundantly  enter.  According  to  the  conception  of  truth 
which  our  critical  theory  of  knowledge  has  compelled  us  to 
hold,  the  answer  to  this  question  leads  on  to  the  affirmation  or 
denial  of  an  aesthetical  and  ethical  being  for  Reality  itself. 
But  how  illusory  does  the  search  for  the  truth  along  such 
lines  of  thinking  seem  to  many  minds  ?  To  be  sure,  many 
men,  and  even  —  it  must  be  admitted  —  men  generally,  seem 
to  themselves  to  know  that  real  things  are  beautiful  or  ugly  ; 
and  that  they  do  behave  in  admirable  and  commendable,  or  in 
morally  dubious  and  even  detestable,  ways.  But  among  all 
the  seeming  possessions  of  the  human  mind,  in  its  growing 
mastery  of  the  real  being  and  actual  transactions  of  things, 
no  others  are  so  fickle,  evanescent,  and  easily  controverted 
as  are  such  judgments  as  these.  Is  not  the  sphere  of  ethics, 
then,  strictly  limited  to  the  actions  of  men,  when  those 
actions  are  directed  toward  the  realization  of  ends  which  they 
themselves  hold  in  consciousness  ?  And,  on  the  contrary, 
what  more  obviously  imaginative  and  emotional,  instead  of 
strictly  cognitive,  than  the  impressions  and  opinions  of  men 
about  the  beauty  of  different  natural  objects  ;  or  even  about 
those  artistic  products  which  they  know  to  be  consciously 
constructed  in  the  effort  to  realize  some  particular  person's 
conception  of  what  is  beautiful  ?  Surely  anthropomorphic 
and  anthropopathic  tendencies  derived  from  excesses  of  emo- 
tion and  imagination  should  be  checked  by  the  stern  hand  of 
reason  when  they  propose  to  construct  Reality  after  a  pattern 
suitable  to  their  mind.  At  this  point  we  have  surely  come  to 
the  limits  of  affirmation  in  the  light  of  a  critical  epistemology. 

Now  the  sincerity  and  forcefulness  of  such  protests  as  the 
foregoing  must  be  cheerfully  conceded.  Human  knowledge 
of  real  things  and  of  their  actual  transactions,  as  properly 


ETHICAL  AND  AESTHETIC AL   "MOMENTA"         521 

falling  under  ethical  and  aesthetical  ideals,  —  if,  indeed,  one 
may  speak  of  "knowledge"  here,  —  is  certainly  of  a  some- 
what different  order,  and  appears  to  repose  on  different 
grounds  from  the  order  and  the  grounds  with  which  the 
analysis  of  the  primary  cognitive  judgment  has  made  us 
familiar.  That  this  is  so,  the  language  and  the  action  of  men 
render  obvious  enough.  For  men  are  usually  willing  to  say, 
"  It  seems  to  me  so,"  or  "  Such  is  my  opinion,"  rather  than 
"  I  know,"  whenever  their  first  unqualified  affirmations  of  an 
aesthetical  order  are  called  in  question.  Two  observers,  stand- 
ing before  a  scene  in  nature,  or  a  work  of  art,  would  discuss 
the  question  of  its  aesthetical  character  in  a  quite  different 
manner  from  that  which  they  would  inevitably  follow,  should 
one  of  the  two  deny  the  existence,  in  reality,  of  the  object 
under  discussion.  And  although  there  is  nothing  about  which 
contention  may  become  more  earnest  than  about  the  ethics 
of  the  Divine  dealings  with  man,  it  is  only  necessary  to  bring 
the  contention  to  those  tests  of  truth  which  are  ordinarily 
offered  either  by  logical  praxis  or  by  epistemological  theory,  in 
order  to  make  clear  certain  characteristic  weaknesses  in  the 
grounds  on  which  such  contesting  arguments  repose.  More- 
over, the  study  of  the  history  of  opinion  shows  that  what 
seems  to  one  man  proof  of  the  ethically  and  aesthetically 
Divine  appears  to  another  no  better  than  sure  marks  of  the 
controlling  power  of  a  wholly  bad  and  ugly  Devil.  Ormuzd 
and  Ahriman  both  appear  to  have  their  eternal  and  unshak- 
able thrones  in  the  deepest  recesses  of  Reality,  if  once  we 
begin  to  admit  that  Reality  is  known  at  all  as  coming  under 
ethical  and  aesthetical  ideals. 

All  such  considerations,  however,  and  any  others  which  can 
be  adduced,  do  not  overthrow  or  modify  the  integrity  of  the 
position  to  which  we  have  been  forced  by  taking  the  point  of 
view  of  a  critical  epistemology.  And  some  of  the  consid- 
erations usually  considered  adverse  have  no  bearing  on  the 
problem  as  raised  from  the  purely  epistemological  point  of- 


522         ETHICAL   AND   ^STHETICAL    "MOMENTA" 

view.  Whether  Reality  is  a  mixture  of  the  ethically  and 
aesthetically  good  with  the  ethically  and  aesthetically  bad  ;  or 
whether  it  is  all  good  or  all  as  bad  as  is  compatible  with  the 
conditions  of  existence  ;  or,  finally,  whether  it  is  only  a  pro- 
cess, in  which  the  good  and  bad  are  contesting  the  place  of 
supremacy,  with  the  end  held  responsible  for  the  justification 
of  the  process,  —  these  are  problems  for  the  metaphysics  of 
ethics  and  of  esthetics,  and  for  the  philosophy  of  religion,  to 
answer.  Perhaps  human  reason  can  find  no  satisfactory 
answer  to  these  questions.  But  even  if  it  cannot,  the  facts 
which  affect  the  epistemological  problem  remain  the  same. 
The  continued  influence  of  ethical  and  aesthetical  considera- 
tions upon  human  knowledge  as  to  the  Nature  of  the  really 
Existent  is  a  matter  of  fact.  Ethical  and  sesthetical  "  mo- 
menta "  are  found  actually  to  enter  into  the  very  structure  of 
large  numbers  of  what  seem  to  the  minds  of  men  generally  as 
true  cognitive  judgments.  We  are,  therefore,  not  prepared 
to  deny  all  value,  for  cognition,  to  these  influences  and  to 
this  class  of  "  momenta."  If  the  ethical  and  aesthetical 
nature  of  man  urges  him  on  to  know  the  real  being  and  actual 
transactions  of  things,  in  the  light  of  their  meaning,  and  with 
reference  to  certain  ideas  that  have  for  his  soul  an  incom- 
parable worth,  epistemological  theory  cannot  readily  admit 
that  this  urgency  leads  only  to  error  and  illusion.  For  there 
is  at  least  the  possibility  of  another  view.  Things  may  really 
have  a  meaning :  the  Reality  may  itself  be  the  actual  Ground 
and  real  antitype  of  these  very  ideals.  If  so,  the  one  fatal 
and  unpardonable  error,  the  crime  against  the  Spirit  of 
Truth  that  cannot  be  forgiven,  is  the  refusal  to  make  one's 
subjective  ideals  conform  to  their  antitype  in  Reality.  By  a 
legitimate  hypothesis,  the  large  truthfulness  of  the  judgments 
which  men  frame  under  these  influences  may  be  vindicated ; 
and  the  limitations  and  errors  which  belong  to  these  judg- 
ments may  be  satisfactorily  explained. 
••  It  has  been  the  almost  universal  opinion  that  the  great 


ETHICAL   AND  ESTHETIC AL   "MOMENTA"          523 

artists  and  the  prophetic  minds  of  the  race  are  discoverers 
and  teachers  of  important  truth.  This  opinion  implies  that 
ethical  and  aesthetical  insight,  and  constructive  imagination 
and  thought  founded  upon  such  insight,  give  to  the  mind 
something  that  it  may  trust  regarding  the  real  being  and 
actual  transactions  of  things.  We  share  in  this  opinion. 
We,  too,  refuse  to  believe  that  truth  is  attained  or  demon- 
strated as  a  purely  logical  affair.  In  the  ethical  sphere,  in- 
spiration and  revelation  are  not  to  be  regarded  as  extraneous 
to  universal  human  experience,  or  as  contradicting  its  funda- 
mental convictions  and  ordinary  modes  of  construction  and 
development.  The  rather  is  the  belief  in  inspiration  and 
revelation  founded  upon  facts  which  are  integral  and  perma- 
nent factors  in  human  experience.  The  aesthetical  feelings 
and  their  resulting  judgments,  as  they  have  found  expression 
in  works  of  art,  cannot  be  denied  participation  in  the  con- 
stitution and  growth  of  that  entire  body  of  truth  which  rep- 
resents the  sum-total  of  the  achievements  of  human  cognitive 
faculty.  Who  will  for  a  moment  suppose  that  if  we  could 
take  from  men  the  conceptions  and  opinions  they  either 
incline  toward,  or  more  definitely  frame,  under  influence 
from  ethical  and  sesthetical  considerations,  we  should  thus 
increase  or  improve  their  knowledge  of  "  the  truth  of  things  "  ? 
Truths  of  conduct  and  of  life  —  the  best  attainable  answers 
to  the  questions,  "  What  ought  I  to  do  ?  "  and  "  What  may  I 
hope  ?  "  —  are  undoubtedly  the  peculiar  sphere  within  which 
moral  and  artistic  insight  is  most  effective  and  trustworthy. 
But  one  should  never  try,  as  did  Kant,  wholly  to  separate 
these  questions  from  that  question  which  he  called  "  purely 
speculative ; "  from  the  question,  namely,  "  What  can  I 
know?"  Reason,  in  its  practical  and  artistic  employment, 
does  not  comprise  another  and  somewhat  distinct  set  of 
faculties.  What  I  should  do,  and  what  I  may  hope,  are 
dependent  upon  what  I  can  know.  And  what  I  do  know, 
or  assume  with  an  irresistible  intensity  of  conviction  that  I 


524         ETHICAL   AND  ^STHETICAL   "MOMENTA" 

know,  is,  in  turn,  dependent  upon  what  I  believe  should  be 
done  and  may  be  hoped. 

For  human  reason  is  not  a  compound  of  loosely  related 
faculties, —  with  an  a  priori  outfit  of  rules  designed  for  things, 
of  intellectual  ideals  that  compel  or  allure  it  into  error,  and 
of  practical  maxims  that  must  be  believed  in,  and  acted  upon, 
although  they  afford  no  objective  truth.  Reason  is  a  living 
unity  ;  it  is  nothing  less  than  the  entire  soul  of  man  regarded 
as  both  active  and  receptive  in  commerce  with  Reality.  In 
its  own  ministrations,  whether  as  belonging  to  the  individual 
or  to  the  race,  there  is  no  sacrilege  which  it  visits  with  a 
more  dreadful  vengeance  than  that  committed  in  the  effort 
to  extinguish  any  of  the  sacred  fires  which  are  burning  on  its 
one  altar. 

Even  the  most  wow-intellectual,  the  least  conceptual  and 
ratiocinative  of  the  arts  is  a  ministration  of  truth  to  those 
whose  ears  have  been  touched  so  as  to  be  open  and  receptive 
to  it.  Music,  as  such,  conveys  a  message  to  the  human  soul 
which  cannot  be  thrown  into  the  forms  of  cognitive  judgment, 
or  of  a  convincing  syllogism  that  illustrates  the  invincible 
character  of  the  principle  of  sufficient  reason.  It  is  the  in- 
comparable master,  however,  of  the  simpler,  more  massive  and 
fundamental,  the  universal  and  unchanging  forms  of  human 
emotion.  The  life  which  it  expresses,  cultivates,  and  expands 
is  the  life  of  those  feelings  that  have,  in  themselves,  some- 
thing of  an  undying  and  an  ideal  value.  But  he  would  have 
a  hard  task  who  should  undertake  to  convince  any  lover  of 
music  who  is  at  the  same  time  intelligently  appreciative  and 
reflective  as  to  the  meaning  of  his  own  experience,  that  no 
truer  view  of  the  nature  of  life  and  of  all  Reality  is  gained 
through  its  sesthetical  ministrations.  The  rather  would  such 
an  one  be  inclined  to  maintain  that  an  epitome  of  the  history 
of  the  human  soul,  and  of  the  race,  etched  in  broad  lines  of 
emotion,  may  be  given  in  a  great  musical  composition  as  in 
no  other  way. 


ETHICAL  AND  ^STHETICAL   "MOMENTA"          525 

It  is  in  poetry,  however,  that  ethical  and  aesthetical  in- 
fluences may  combine  with  products  of  accurate  perception 
and  careful,  well-grounded  reflective  thinking  to  create  pic- 
tures of  life  and  Reality  that  have  a  high  degree  of  value 
for  the  truth  they  convey  to  the  mind  of  man.  However 
one  may  decide  the  contention  between  those  who  exalt  the 
pleasure-giving  function  of  poetry  and  those  who  emphasize  its 
didactic  power  and  disciplinary  offices,  —  and  this  contention 
does  not  concern  us  here,  —  there  can  be  no  doubt  that  men 
generally,  and  in  all  time,  have  looked  to  the  greater  poets  as 
to  seers  of  the  truth  of  things.  "  Imitative  art  in  its  highest 
form  —  poetry,"  says  Aristotle  —  "  is  an  expression  of  the  uni- 
versal element  in  human  life  ;  "  and,  again,  "  Poetry  is  more 
philosophic  and  of  higher  worth  than  history."  This  estimate 
may  seem  exaggerated,  and  the  accompanying  depreciation  of 
history  unworthy.  But  when  a  modern  critic  declares  that 
"a  great  poet  must  be  a  man  made  wise  by  large  experience, 
much  feeling,  and  deep  reflection  ;  above  all,  he  must  have  a 
hold  of  the  great  central  truth  of  things,"  he  is  enforcing  the 
same  epistemological  truth  which  we  are  expounding.  And 
the  demand  which  the  art  of  poetry  makes  upon  the  soul  of 
its  devotee,  if  met  successfully,  enables  the  product  of  the  art 
not  only  to  give  a3sthetical  enjoyment  for  its  beauty,  but  to 
"  improve  an  opportunity "  for  conveying  to  other  minds  a 
truer  and  broader  conception  of  that  meaning  which  lies  in 
the  real  being  and  actual  transactions  of  things.  The  poet's 
work  may  exemplify  what  Aubrey  De  Yere  says  of  the  work 

of  Wordsworth :  — 

"  Wisdom  sheathed 

In  song  love-humble ;  contemplations  high, 
That  built  like  larks  their  nests  upon  the  ground; 
Insight  and  vision,  sympathies  profound 
That  spanned  the  total  of  humanity." 

"  Poetry,"  says  Matthew  Arnold,  "  interprets  in  two  ways : 
it  interprets  by  expressing  with  magical  felicity  the  physi- 
ognomy and  movement  of  the  outward  world,  and  it  inter- 


526         ETHICAL   AND   ^STHETICAL   "MOMENTA" 

prets  by  expressing,  with  inspired  conviction,  the  ideas  and 
laws  of  the  inward  world  of  man's  moral  and  spiritual  nature. 
In  other  words,  poetry  is  interpretative,  both  by  having  natu- 
ral magic  in  it,  and  by  having  moral  profundity"  Which- 
ever of  its  two  great  offices  poetry  worthily  fulfils,  whether 
it  be  the  artistic  representation  of  the  actual  world  or  the 
creation  of  ideals  that  refine  and  rest  the  soul,  it  may  fitly 
claim  to  be  the  teacher  of  truth  to  humanity. 

It  is  not,  of  course,  easy  —  and  perhaps  it  is  not  possible 
—  to  vindicate  the  objective  truthfulness  of  the  judgment 
which  the  average  man  makes  when,  on  contemplating  some 
particular  thing  in  nature,  he  declares  it  to  be  beautiful; 
or  of  the  judgment  which  the  devout  believer  in  Providence 
pronounces  when  he  makes  a  declaration  as  to  the  ethical 
significance  of  some  natural  event.  For  such  judgments  as 
these  are  confessedly  do  not  rest  upon  major  premises  which 
themselves  represent  the  incontestable  summaries,  as  it  were, 
of  the  experience  either  of  the  individual  or  of  the  race. 
One  does  not  say,  "  The  tree  is  beautiful "  with  precisely  the 
same  degree  or  kind  of  conviction  as  that  with  which  one 
says,  "  The  tree  is  bare  of  its  leaves,"  or,  "  The  tree  is  begin- 
ning to  turn  green."  And  the  devoutest  believer  in  Providence 
can  scarcely  turn  from  the  man  who  denies  in  toto  the  truth 
of  his  opinion  respecting  the  providential  character  of  a  natu- 
ral event  with  any  stronger  feelings  than  those  of  a  subdued 
sadness  at  a  lack  of  religious  insight  or  of  so-called  faith. 
On  the  other  hand,  the  reflective  student  of  human  nature 
will  constantly  recur  to  such  general  facts  as  have  already 
been  sufficiently  called  to  mind.  They  concern  the  deep- 
set  tendency  to  take  an  aesthetical  and  an  ethical  view  of 
the  entire  World  and  of  what  takes  place  in  it.  And  if 
this  view  does  not  contravene  or  impair  the  cognitions  that 
arise  when  things  are  considered  from  other  points  of  view, 
the  significance  of  this  tendency,  and  the  theory  of  Reality 
it  tends  to  support,  cannot  be  overlooked  in  fidelity  to  a 


ETHICAL  AND  ^STHETICAL  "MOMENTA"         527 

comprehensive  philosophy  of  knowledge.  "We  may,  perhaps, 
even  feel  warranted  in  adopting  the  admonitions  of  the 
preacher,  Frederick  Robertson  :  "  But  of  course,  if  you  lead  a 
sensual  life,  or  a  mercenary  or  artificial  life,  you  will  not 
read  these  truths  in  nature.  A  pure  heart  and  a  simple, 
manly  life  alone  can  reveal  to  you  all  that  which  seer  and 
poet  saw." 

It  is  not  a  part  of  the  legitimate  task  of  epistemology, 
however,  to  assign  to  the  beautiful  and  to  the  morally  good 
their  places  in  that  system  of  beings  which  is  known  to  man 
as  real.  Other  branches  of  philosophy  must  discuss  the 
question,  whether  Reality  itself  is  not  the  Ground  of  all 
human  ethical  and  aesthetical  ideals;  is  not  Itself  the  all- 
beautiful  and  ethically  perfect  One.  But  the  critical  study 
of  the  problem  of  knowledge  prepares  the  way  for  an  ap- 
proach to  these  questions.  It  does  even  much  more  than 
this  ;  it  indicates  what  that  answer  is  likely  to  be.  And  to 
make  this  clear  we  have  only  to  recall  at  this  point  the 
different  impulses  which  have  been  received  from  the  con- 
clusions reached  upon  the  various  subordinate  problems  of 
epistemology.  These  all  appear  to  combine  in  enforcing  a 
unitary  conception  of  the  Reality  that  is  made  known  to  us 
in  our  system  of  cognitions  both  as  individuals  and  as  mem- 
bers of  the  race. 

The  life  of  the  mind  of  man  must  be  described  as  begin- 
ning and  proceeding  in  the  form  of  an  ever  richer  and  more 
content-full  knowledge  of  the  Self,  existing  and  acting  in 
manifold  relations  to  beings  that  are  indubitably  distinguished 
from  the  Self  as  not  belonging  to  it,  —  whether  as  its  states 
or  its  doings,  —  but  as  the  states  and  the  doings  of  not-selves. 
What  these  "  not-selves  "  really  are,  and  what  they  actually 
do,  can  be  known  only  as  the  mind  constitutes  them  after 
the  analogy  of  the  self-known  Self.  That  they  are  known 
as  thus  constituted  is  a  fundamental  epistemological  fact; 
and  the  denial  of  the  import  of  this  fact  leads  to  a  seep- 


528          ETHICAL   AND   ^STHETICAL   "MOMENTA" 

tical  solipsism  so  complete  and  so  absurd  that  it  does  not 
even  admit  of  intelligible  statement.  That  "  non-selves " 
really  are  thus  constituted  is  the  truth  which,  in  the  form 
of  an  ontological  postulate,  is  needed  to  validate  the  results 
of  all  human  knowledge  ;  and  which  is,  in  fact,  virtually  ac- 
cepted by  all  cognitive  minds  as  validating  these  results. 
Those  fundamental  forms  of  the  thought-process,  which  are 
called  the  principles  of  identity  and  of  sufficient  reason, 
implicate  this  "  self-like "  constitution  of  things.  Things 
are  known  as  having  any  identity,  as  really  being  at  all,  only 
on  the  supposition  that  they  in  their  changes  remain  true 
to  immanent  ideas.  And  they  are  known  as  united  together 
into  the  unity  of  one  real  World  only  when  they  are  re- 
garded as  being  and  behaving  in  a  quasi-rational  and  teleo- 
logical  way.  Indeed,  it  is  only  when  we  regard  them  as 
"  momenta "  in  the  Life  of  a  Being  which  is  actually  realiz- 
ing its  own  immanent  ideas  that  we  can  be  said  to  know 
them  as  belonging  to  the  system  of  the  one  great  and  orderly 
World.  For  the  ontological  implicates  — "  envisaged,  be- 
lieved in,  or  inferred"  —  of  all  human  knowledge,  both  as  a 
fact  and  as  a  growth,  may  be  gathered  into  one  inclusive 
implicate :  The  System  of  interrelated  beings  which  are  the 
objects  of  knowledge  is  known  only  through  its  manifestation 
of  the  attributes  of  a  Self.  Whatever  characteristics  which 
we  know  to  belong  to  ourselves  must  be  excluded  from  our 
conception  of  this  System;  still  only  such  implicates  as  the 
Self  knows  itself  to  have  can  be  included  in  the  conception. 

It  is  at  once  obvious,  therefore,  that  ethical  and  resthetical 
predicates  are  by  no  means  necessarily  shut  out  from  man's 
knowledge  of  Reality.  It  is  no  more  intrinsically  absurd,  as 
it  were,  to  attribute  predicates  of  this  kind  to  the  system  of 
interrelated  beings  than  to  attribute  the  other  predicates 
given  to  this  system  by  the  physical  sciences.  But  what  par- 
ticular self-known  predicates  may  be  assigned  to  Reality,  and 
with  what  modified  meaning,  it  belongs  to  reflective  thinking 


ETHICAL   AND  ^STHETICAL   "MOMENTA"         529 

to  determine.  Even  among  themselves,  men  differ  greatly 
concerning  the  conformity  of  particular  beings,  or  of  concrete 
actions,  to  their  own  ethical  and  sesthetical  ideals.  This  differ- 
ence shows  that  the  mind  is  here  dealing  with  subjects  which, 
although  not  to  be  wholly  disconnected  from  its  most  assured 
cognitions,  are  not  connected  with  these  cognitions  in  the 
most  assured  way.  They  belong  to  the  realm  in  which  feeling, 
and  what  is  called  "  faith,"  have  a  more  important  part  to 
perform.  But  this  conclusion  is  a  very  different  thing  from 
assigning  all  apparent  cognitions  concerning  these  subjects  to 
the  realm  of  illusion,  or  of  the  wholly  unknowable.  For  it  has 
been  shown  that  feeling  and  faith  are  factors  in  all  knowl- 
edge. And,  above  all,  what  we  do  most  assuredly  know 
about  Reality  is  favorable,  rather  than  otherwise,  to  the  con- 
fidence that  when  the  voice  of  humanity  gives  It  an  ethical 
and  an  aesthetical  significance,  this  voice  is  not  publishing 
the  dreams  of  its  own  night  already  past,  but  is  rather  pro- 
claiming a  truth  about  Reality  that  is  advancing  into  the 
clearer  light  of  the  more  perfect  day. 


CHAPTER  XVIII 

KNOWLEDGE  AND  REALITY 

THERE  are  two  questions  of  very  general  import  and 
somewhat  indefinite  character,  that  seem  to  require 
further  discussion  in  the  light  of  the  conclusions  at  which 
we  have  arrived  from  a  critical  study  of  human  knowledge. 
Of  these  the  first  concerns  itself  with  an  attempt  more  pre- 
cisely to  determine  the  relations  in  which  the  cognitive 
processes  stand  to  that  Reality  which  they  claim  mentally 
to  represent ;  and  the  second  aims  at  so  apprehending  the 
nature  of  this  Reality  as  best  to  comport  with  the  assured 
conclusions  of  a  critical  but  positive  epistemology.  In 
other  words,  we  raise  again  the  inquiries :  What  has  real- 
ity to  do  with  knowledge,  and  knowledge  with  reality  ?  and, 
What  kind  of  a  theoretical  construction  of  the  system  of 
real  beings  and  actual  transactions  is  most  compatible  with 
the  results  of  epistemology  ?  It  will  be  seen  at  once  that 
both  these  questions  are  metaphysical.  The  former  borrows 
from  metaphysics  a  certain  ontological  conception,  that  it  may 
the  better  clear  up  our  conceptions  of  the  nature  and  validity 
of  knowledge  ;  the  latter  criticises  and  purifies  the  ontologi- 
cal conception  of  (and  so  lends  something  to)  metaphysics  by 
adjusting  it  to  already  accepted  conceptions  of  the  nature  and 
validity  of  knowledge.  Both  of  these  questions  have  occu- 
pied us  frequently :  the  detailed  discussion  of  the  former  is 
drawing  to  its  close  ;  and  the  latter  must  soon  definitively  be 
merged  in  a  systematic  and  critical  doctrine  of  Reality.  But 
the  task  of  a  critical  philosophy  of  knowledge  will  be  more 


KNOWLEDGE  AND  REALITY  531 

satisfactorily  accomplished  if  its  general  positions  on  these 
subjects  are  separated  from  the  details  of  subordinate  dis- 
cussions, and  briefly  presented  in  broader  and  stronger 
outlines. 

The  relations,  in  general,  which  exist  between  Knowledge 
and  Reality  have  thus  far  been  expressed  in  a  variety  of 
ways.  For  example,  it  has  been  held  that  cognition  can  take 
place  only  as  a  living  relation  between  subject  and  object ; 
and  that  in  every  act  of  cognition  the  object  is  some  form  or 
manifestation  of  reality.  Knowledge  itself  then  appears  as 
an  actual  commerce  between  the  knower  and  some  really 
existent  either  Self  or  Thing.  For  who  can  escape  the  force 
of  such  an  argument  as  this :  No  possible  knowing  without  a 
real  knower  and  a  real  being  known  ;  and  no  actual  knowing 
without  a  relation,  in  reality,  being  established  between 
them  ?  But  when  psychological  analysis  was  employed  to 
show  how  the  entire  mind  is  concerned  in  knowledge,  differ- 
ent words  were  used  to  express  the  peculiar  relations  in 
which  the  different  so-called  faculties,  or  forms  of  mental 
functioning,  stand  toward  the  object,  in  the  unity  of  the  cog- 
nitive process.  Moreover  the  different  kinds  of  knowledge  — 
such  as  immediate  and  mediate  —  seem  to  require  a  still 
further  differentiation  of  these  relations.  In  knowledge  by 
sense-perception  or  self-consciousness,  for  example,  words 
like  "  intuition  "  or  "  envisagement "  appear  appropriate  to 
express  the  relation  actually  existing  between  the  cognitive 
subject  and  the  object  of  cognition.  While  in  both  imme- 
diate and  mediate  knowledge,  the  part  which  the  will  takes  — 
for  all  cognition  is  essentially  active  —  is  expressed  in  highly 
figurative  terms,  as  a  sort  of  "  seizure  "  of  reality.  Feeling, 
too,  appears  to  present  its  claims  to  some  part  in  this  series, 
or  system,  of  complicated  relations ;  and  its  claims  are  best 
satisfied  by  assigning  to  the  affective  powers  of  the  soul  the 
function  of  believing  in,  or  entertaining  a  conviction  respect- 
ing, reality. 


532  KNOWLEDGE   AND  REALITY 

And  now  if  one  enters  into  the  details  of  the  relations  in 
which  reality  stands  to  knowledge  in  the  processes  of  sense- 
perception,  when  considered  under  terms  of  a  psycho-physical 
and  psychological  theory,  one  will  be  compelled  to  emphasize 
strongly  the  admissions  that  slip  or  are  wrung  from  the 
founder  of  modern  epistemological  criticism.  For  Kant's  doc- 
trine, strictly  interpreted,  forbids  him  to  assert,  and  even  to 
postulate  or  conjecture,  any  definite  forms  of  relation  between 
the  mind  and  things-in-themselves  ;  since  there  can  be  no  other 
than  a  merely  negative  and  limiting  concept  of  extra-mental 
reality.  But  Kant  himself  constantly  assumes  and  speaks  as 
though  the  content  of  sense,  in  distinction  from  its  form,  were 
"  caused  "  by  a  reality  that  is  something  more  than  our  phe- 
nomenon ;  and  every  attempt  at  a  science  of  psychology  is 
obliged  to  deal  with  the  experiences  of  cognition  through  the 
senses  in  the  same  way.  The  precise  terms  employed  by  the 
psychologist  to  express  this  relation  of  dependence  may  vary 
greatly ;  but  in  some  form  a  certain  relation  or  set  of  relations 
must  always  be  assumed.  That  which  actually  happens  in 
what  really  exists,  but  exists  as  a  not-me,  either  "  causes,"  or 
"  excites,"  or  "  stimulates,"  or  "  runs  parallel  with  "  my  sen- 
sory-motor consciousness  considered  as  a  cognition  of  chang- 
ing things.  So,  too,  when  we  come  to  consider  the  nature  of 
thinking  and  the  part  it  plays  in  cognition,  we  seem  compelled 
to  express  the  essence  of  the  relations  between  knowledge  and 
reality  as  some  sort  of  a  "  correspondence."  The  "  categories," 
so-called,  are  not,  indeed,  to  be  conceived  of  as  copies  of  trans- 
cendent realities.  But  neither  can  they  be  regarded  as  pure 
rules  of  our  understanding,  that  are  wholly  independent  of 
extra-mental  realities,  and  govern  in  a  world  apart,  as  it  were. 

Cognition  itself  appears  to  itself  to  be  essentially  this :  the 
mental  representation  of  the  real  being  and  actual  transac- 
tions of  things.  And  no  other  better  word  can  be  found  for 
summing  up  the  manifold  relations  of  Knowledge  and  Reality, 
essentially  considered,  than  this  word,  a  "  commerce  "  between 


KNOWLEDGE  AND  REALITY  533 

mind  and  its  object,  the  truly  existent.  Finally,  it  was  shown 
that  a  world  of  reality  is  so  "  implicate  "  in  human  knowledge 
that  the  denial  of  all  meaning  to  this  term  —  pregnant  as  it  is 
Avith  an  entire  brood  of  relations  —  lauds  us  in  the  very  depths 
of  absurdity.  Whereas,  if  we  will  once  admit  with  hopeful  in- 
telligence  and  reasonable  cheerfulness  what  we  are  bound  to 
admit  in  some  manner  and  to  an  indefinitely  large  extent,  — 
namely,  the  correspondence  or  systematic  relationship  of  the 
cognitive  Self  with  that  all-inclusive  Reality  which  encompasses 
it,  when  conceived  of  as  an  Absolute  Self,  —  then  all  the  separate 
and  subordinate  forms  of  relation  are  taken  up  into  and  merged 
in  a  relation  between  the  individual  and  the  Universal,  both 
cognized  in  terms  of  Self. 

It  is  some  such  view  as  this  which  we  desire  now  somewhat 
further  to  expound  and  to  defend ;  and  perhaps  the  fittest  be- 
ginning of  both  exposition  and  defence  will  be  to  remove  cer- 
tain misapprehensions  which  commonly  stand  in  its  way. 
Here,  as  so  often  happens  in  every  branch  of  philosophy,  the 
most  serious  and  dangerous  misapprehensions  arise  in  the 
form  of  those  half-truths  that  represent  the  results  of  over- 
hasty  and  too  comprehensive  generalizations.  Among  such 
generalizations  the  various  forms  of  an  Identity-hypothesis 
are  particularly  prominent.  But  the  relations  between  cog- 
nizing subject  and  object  cognized,  —  the  knower  and  the 
known,  —  in  which  cognition  itself  consists,  cannot  be  sum- 
marized with  fidelity  to  the  facts  and  laws  of  human  experi- 
ence in  any  form  of  a  theory  of  identity.  To  know  is  not,  in 
fact,  to  identify  one's  Self  with  the  object  of  one's  knowledge ; 
and  to  know  one  thing  from  another,  or  any  one  particular  thing 
as  related  to  others,  is  not  simply  to  pronounce  upon  the  self- 
identity  of  this  one  thing,  or  to  affirm  the  identity  of  all  things. 
That  the  very  nature  of  knowledge  implies  some  kind  of  an 
interrelation  in  a  unity  of  knower  and  of  all  objects  of  knowl- 
edge has  been  the  ontological  thesis  to  which  all  our  critical 
examination  of  the  epistemological  problem  has  been  tending. 


534  KNOWLEDGE  AND  REALITY 

But  that  knowledge  is  essentially  based  also  on  the  making 
of  distinctions,  and  that  in  its  very  essence  it  validates  a  dif- 
ference in  things  —  a  self-differentiation  that  must  he  regarded 
as  trans-subjective,  as  also  ontological  —  has  been  made  equally 
clear.  We  cannot  even  admit  the  truth  of  Wundt's  declara- 
tion 1  that,  in  fact,  object  and  active  mental  representation  (  Ob- 
ject and  Vbrstellung*)  are  originally  identical ;  and  that,  there- 
fore, in  this  fact  is  to  be  found  the  easy  and  complete  solution 
of  all  the  difficulties  which  belong  to  the  problem  of  the  trans- 
subjectivity  of  the  object  of  cognition ;  for  unless  an  active 
mental  representation  distinguishes  the  total  content  of  con- 
sciousness in  such  a  way  as  to  result  in  an  object  that  is  not 
and  cannot  be  identified  with  the  representing  subject,  no  cog- 
nition of  things  can  take  place.  Psychologically,  the  process 
on  which  such  cognition  depends  is  one  of  discrimination, 
which  results  in  setting  the  Thing  over  against  the  Self  as  a 
not-self. 

And  even  that  process  of  assimilation  and  conscious  recog- 
nition which  results  in  knowing  the  Self  as  one  with  itself, 
and  the  Thing  as  one  thing  that  is,  however,  a  not-self,  bears 
no  real  resemblance  to  the  cognition  of  an  identity  in  that 
meaning  of  the  word  which  is  employed  by  the  theory  in  ques- 
tion. For  the  very  conception  of  identity  has  its  warrant  in 
the  activity  of  a  discriminating  consciousness  which  recognizes 
that  the  successive  differences  in  the  appearance  of  Self  and 
of  things  follow  some  order,  as  though  controlled  by  an  imma- 
nent idea.  At  no  time  in  the  growth  of  its  knowledge  can 
the  self-conscious  Subject  regard  its  object-thing  as  identical 
with  itself.  To  succeed  in  doing  this  would  be  to  destroy  the 
existence  of  the  thing  as  an  object  of  cognition.  Nor  could 
different  things  be  known  as  identical  without  destroying  both 
the  subjective  influence  and  the  objective  validity  of  that  very 
connection  between  things  which  makes  all  our  conceptual 
and  inferential  knowledge  of  them  possible.  The  principle  of 

1  Compare  System  der  Philosophic,  p.  142. 


KNOWLEDGE   AND   REALITY  535 

sufficient  reason  has  been  shown  to  be  regulative  and  suggest- 
ive in  the  cognitive  experience  of  man,  rather  than  an  ada- 
mantine and  quasi-physical  law  of  identification.  It  guides 
and  stimulates  the  mind  in  its  effort  to  know  things  as  bound 
together  into  an  ideal  unity,  although  still  of  necessity  differ- 
ent and  individual,  because  in  fact  they  pay  attention  to  each 
other.  This  may  be  expressed  by  saying  that  things,  however 
different,  are  known  as  regarding  not  only  their  own  but  each 
other's  immanent  ideas.  Even  as  applied  to  objective  phe- 
nomena, the  principle  is  not  so  much  dictatorial  and  compul- 
sory as  insinuating,  persuading,  divining,  like  the  rules  that 
control  an  object  of  art.  In  self-consciousness,  too,  it  was 
seen  that  the  relation  of  subject  and  object  is  not  properly, 
and  is  far  from  being  completely,  defined  as  one  of  identity. 
Nor  does  the  so-called  identity  which  I  know  myself  to  have 
—  the  highest  conceivable  form  of  identification  —  appear  as 
the  principle  which  defines  the  relation  of  subject  and  object 
in  knowing.  Even  here  the  complete  identification  of  the  two 
would  be  the  complete  cessation  of  the  life  of  self-knowledge. 
In  self-consciousness,  therefore,  where  the  ultimate  ground 
for  the  identity  of  subject  and  object  is  sought,  the  question 
must  still  be  dealt  with,  whether  this  fundamental  opposition, 
as  it  were,  in  all  Being,  this  immanent  activity  that  differen- 
tiates subject  and  object,  can  be  abolished,  as  the  ontological 
identity-theory  maintains. 

If  every  vestige  of  a  claim  to  explain  the  subjective  charac- 
ter of  knowledge  by  an  identity-hypothesis  vanishes  before  the 
critical  analysis  of  psychology  and  epistemology,  every  trace 
of  comfort  disappears  when  the  same  hypothesis  is  tested  on 
the  side  of  its  ontological  value  and  validity.  The  conception 
which  it  offers  of  an  absolutely  changeless  Being,  an  Entity 
that  is  rigid,  self-identical  and  definable,  if  at  all,  only  by  the 
possession  of  a  fixed  set  of  most  highly  abstract  qualifications, 
is  theoretically  untenable.  It  accounts  for  nothing  as  a  working 
hypothesis ;  and  measured  by  the  teleological  idea  or  brought 


536  KNOWLEDGE   AND  REALITY 

to  face  the  standards  of  ethics  and  aesthetics,  it  proves  of  no 
practical  value.  And  then  such  a  Being  is  not,  and  cannot 
be,  an  object  of  any  kind  or  degree  of  knowledge.  Common- 
sense  does  not  recognize  it ;  nor  will  it  explain  or  serve  the 
work-a-day  life  of  humanity.  Science  knows  it  not,  and  can 
get  no  actual  service  from  it  as  an  assumption  or  a  theory. 
Philosophy,  feeling,  like  the  lioness,  that  she  must  bring  forth 
only  one  offspring  at  a  birth,  has  often,  indeed,  tried  to  heighten 
the  claims  of  this  single  product  of  her  conception  by  increas- 
ing the  seeming  extent  of  its  superficies  at  the  expense  of 
organic  variety  within.  Thus  has  human  thought  about  the 
One  Being,  in  which  all  particular  beings  have  as  it  were  their 
share,  been  rendered  much  too  vague  and  devoid  of  content  to 
assist  in  explaining  the  origin,  the  characteristics,  or  the  im- 
port of  the  meanest  of  things.  But  epistemology  reminds 
ontology  of  this  inevitable  obligation :  Unless  the  conception  of 
the  really  existent  World  is  made  to  contain  within  itself  the 
principles  necessary,  not  only  for  establishing  its  own  Unity, 
but  for  explaining  the  infinite  variety  of  the  growing  cognitive 
experience  of  humanity,  valid  knowledge  is  itself  rendered 
impossible. 

From  whatever  point  of  view,  therefore,  we  approach  the 
subject,  it  appears  that  the  relations  of  knowledge  and  reality 
cannot  be  summarized  in  terms  of  an  identity-hypothesis. 
There  is,  however,  another  and  more  subtle  set  of  consid- 
erations which  are  often  employed  unwarrantably  to  restrict 
the  variety  of  admissible  relations  felt  to  be  necessary,  as 
existent  between  the  knowing  subject  and  Reality,  in  order  to 
validate  human  knowledge.  These  considerations  grow,  in 
part,  out  of  that  temptation  to  conceit  which  makes  men  feel 
that  their  way  of  looking  at  things  alone  conveys  the  truth  of 
things  ;  or,  at  least,  that  the  particular  truths  which  come  to 
them  are,  so  to  speak,  preferred  truths  at  the  supreme  court 
of  absolute  reason.  Thus  do  we  find  men  of  science  despising 
that  knowledge  of  natural  objects  and  relations  which  makes 


KNOWLEDGE  AND  REALITY  537 

up  the  entire  product  of  the  "  plain  man's  "  cognitive  activity. 
And  as  for  philosophy  and  its  points  of  view  for  regarding 
Reality,  how  often  do  both  the  unscientific  and  the  so-called 
scientific  regard  it  without  effort  to  conceal  their  contempt ! 
But,  alas !  philosophy  has,  in  turn,  frequently  forgotten  that 
its  own  business  is  to  appreciate  and  understand  the  average 
consciousness  of  mankind,  and  that  the  deep  and  high  things 
of  its  own  seeking  are  all  therein  contained ;  while,  in  these 
modern  days,  to  be  ignorant  of  scientific  truths  is  to  be  incap- 
able of  effective  work  in  philosophizing.  Yet  again,  no  more 
bitter  contempt  of  others,  or  arrogant  conceit  of  superior 
knowledge,  or  confident  assumption  of  being  a  favorite  of  the 
Absolute,  is  anywhere  to  be  found  than  exists  in  the  breasts 
of  those  who  know  neither  science  nor  philosophy.  Witness 
the  conversation  and  the  conduct,  in  spite  of  all  that  is  called 
"  modern  education,"  of  the  multitude  of  men  in  trades,  busi- 
ness, politics,  and  even  the  so-called  "  learned  professions  "  ! 

Now,  so  far  as  such  misapprehensions  are  due  to  ethical 
and  aesthetical  influences,  the  theory  of  knowledge  cannot 
deal  with  them.  But  there  is  really  an  intellectual  fallacy 
here  which  is  in  conflict  with  important  epistemological  prin- 
ciples. This  fallacy  consists  in  the  assumption  that  only  one 
way  of  mentally  representing  the  real  being  and  actual  trans- 
actions of  things  can  be  true  ;  or,  at  any  rate,  that  the  truth 
to  be  preferred,  for  all  purposes,  before  all  other  truths,  is 
either  the  so-called  "  common-sense,"  the  scientific,  or  the 
philosophical.  Such  a  view  of  the  nature  of  knowledge,  of  the 
nature  of  Reality,  and  of  the  nature  of  the  cognitive  relation 
between  the  knowing  subject  and  the  reality  known,  is — to 
speak  plainly —  both  false  and  degrading.  Even  the  most 
meagre  human  cognition  results  from  an  inner  play  of  powers 
that  are  capable  of  catching  and  truthfully  reflecting  many 
sides  of  the  real  being  and  actual  transactions  of  things.  And 
Reality  is_rich  enough  to  supply  a  true  and  manifold  content 
to  all  degrees  and  kinds  of  cognizing  minds.  The  truths  of 


538  KNOWLEDGE   AND   REALITY 

the  plain  man's  consciousness,  of  the  scientific  inquirer,  and 
of  the  reflective  thinker,  are  not  contradictory.  They  are  all 
valid ;  because  they  are  all  authenticated  by  the  infinitely  varied 
Life  of  the  really  Existent.  Should  one  doubt  or  fear  for  this 
Life,  that  IT  will  not  be  able  "  to  live  up  to  "  the  growing  life 
in  cognitive  consciousness  of  the  whole  race  of  men  ? 

On  the  contrary,  every  single  thing  and  every  event  actually 
is  all  that  —  and,  doubtless,  infinitely  more  than  —  it  truly 
appears  to  be,  to  the  various  observing  and  reflecting  minds. 
What  is  needed  to  destroy  the  current  fallacy  is,  not  to  dimin- 
ish the  content  of  knowledge,  but  to  increase  the  conception  of 
the  content  of  Reality ;  for  there  is  actually  that  in  every 
thing  and  every  event  which  is  sufficient  to  correspond  to  all 
the  different  ways  of  cognizing  its  reality  which  are  actually 
realized  in  all  the  different  minds. 

Let  this  truth  of  fact  and  of  epistemological  theory  be  illus- 
trated by  the  following  examples.  I  am  standing  upon  the 
shore  of  a  body  of  water,  and  I  stoop  down  and  gather  a  hand- 
ful of  the  sand  which  lies  at  my  feet.  To  me  it  appears  to 
be  what  it  would  appear  to  be  to  any  one  else  of  similar  con- 
stitution of  sense-perceptive  faculty,  who  had  had  a  similar 
experience  in  the  most  ordinary  developments  of  conceptual 
knowledge.  It  is  known  as  mere  "  sand,"  having  such  quali- 
ties as  the  common  senses  of  men  discern  and  such  uses  as 
have  been  ascertained  by  the  growing  experience  of  the  race. 
But  now  I  take  from  my  pocket  a  magnifying-glass  of  good 
lens-power,  and,  by  looking  through  it,  transform  the  common 
sand  into  an  innumerable  collection  of  significant  forms, — 
either  crystals  whose  molecules  have  arranged  themselves  in 
seeming  obedience  to  mathematical  formulas,  or  shells  that 
show  their  origin  in  having  been  deposited  by  millions  of 
living  beings  in  the  past  of  long  ago.  I  carry  this  collection 
to  the  chemical  and  mineralogical  or  biological  laboratory, 
and  the  experts  there  spend  much  time  in  determining  the 
genesis,  the  atomic  constitution,  the  specific  qualifications  and 


KNOWLEDGE  AND  REALITY  539 

physical  or  organic  connections  of  the  elements  of  that  which 
to  the  naked  and  untrained  eye  appears  but  common  sand. 
From  them  I  learn,  with  increasing  wonder  and  admiration, 
of  the  wealth  in  reality  of  that  which  seemed  at  first  so  poor 
and  ordinary  a  thing.  And  as  I  reflect  upon  the  mysterious 
action  of  the  forces  that  either  rapidly  marshalled  the  atoms 
along  what  appear  to  be  consciously  selected  lines  of  prefer- 
ence, or  more  slowly  built  them  into  a  tiny  organism  accord- 
ing to  a  more  or  less  obvious  plan,  I  am  encouraged  to 
attempts  at  higher  flights  of  cognitive  faculty.  The  mar- 
vellous inner  life  of  what  the  scientific  man  calls  Nature,  and 
the  mindful  manifestation  of  what  the  devout  soul  recognizes 
as  the  power  and  wisdom  of  God,  impress  me  profoundly. 
Speculative  interests  are  aided  by  ethical  and  aesthetical  in- 
terests,—  although,  perhaps,  of  a  vaguer  and  less  easily 
defensible  sort.  But,  yielding  to  the  serious  impulse  I  pro- 
claim as  a  cognitive  judgment:  this  tiny  thing,  when  con- 
sidered as  what  it  is  in  itself,  and  what,  in  its  origin  and 
connections,  it  represents,  is  indeed  a  "moment"  of  the 
Divine  Life,  a  realization  in  particular  of  the  Universal 
Spirit,  of  the  Absolute  Self. 

Now  let  it  be  noted  that,  while  all  these  alleged  cognitive 
judgments  as  to  the  being  and  implied  powers  of  this  handful 
of  common  sand  do  not  rest  upon  precisely  the  same  founda- 
tions for  their  genesis  or  for  their  validity,  they  do  not  at  all, 
of  necessity,  contradict  each  other.  They  may  all  be  alike 
true ;  they  may  all  be  needed  to  express,  even  imperfectly, 
the  reality  of  this  particular  thing.  They  seem,  indeed,  to 
follow  so  quietly  and  beautifully  in  train  for  the  mind  that 
will  not  brusquely  (and  almost  brutally)  interrupt  its  own  life 
of  cognition  that  they  have  good  seeming  of  being  true. 
That  sand  there  i«,  —  white,  hard,  heavy,  and  good  for  mor- 
tar or  to  be  burned  for  lime ;  but  it  is  also,  known  to  chem- 
istry as  constituted  out  of  certain  hypothetical  elements,  to 
biology  or  to  mineralogy  as  having  such  a  mechanical  struc- 


540  KNOWLEDGE  AND  REALITY 

ture  or  vital  genesis,  and  to  the  naturalist  as  a  part  of  the  great 
system  of  inorganic  and  organic  evolution.  But  to  the  higher 
philosophical  reflection  it  is,  in  very  truth,  a  thing  of  spiritual 
import,  a  being  that  finds  its  existence  and  attributes  in  the 
same  Ground  in  which  all  existences,  with  all  their  attributes, 
are  found.  To  the  knower,  then,  this  one  particular  thing 
stands,  under  the  general  relations  of  knowledge,  as  being 
at  the  same  time,  and  in  reality,  all  that  sense-perception, 
science,  and  philosophy  tell  him  that  it  is.  And  if  he  would 
know,  as  completely  as  man  can  know,  this  thing,  this  com- 
mon sand,  he  must  regard  it  from  all  these  different  points 
of  view. 

What  is  epistemologically  true  of  any  particular  thing  is 
true  of  every  particular  thing.  Each  most  common  and  lowly 
member  of  that  system  of  real  beings  and  actual  transactions 
which  forms  the  ever  varying  and  yet  ideally  faithful  object  of 
human  knowledge,  presents  an  indefinite  number  of  sides  to  the 
mind  of  the  knower.  Of  the  chair  beneath  me,  of  the  table 
before  me,  of  the  books  upon  their  shelves  over  yonder,  I  may 
truthfully  say :  they  are  really  all  that  ordinary  perception, 
all  that  every  branch  of  scientific  analysis  and  theory,  and  all 
that  the  supreme  generalizations  of  reflective  thinking,  or  the 
insight  of  the  philosophic  spirit,  proclaim  them  to  be.  Each 
of  these  things  reveals  itself  to  the  senses  in  terms  that  are 
peculiar  to  each  sense,  and  that  are  dependent  upon  the  spe- 
cial relations  which  each  sense  sustains  to  the  trans-subjective 
object.  But  without  dividing  its  unity  or  annulling  its  exist- 
ence as  an  object  of  sense-perception,  each  of  them  also 
appeals  to  the  sciences  of  chemistry,  physics,  biology,  and 
even  to  the  history  of  the  development  of  the  human  race, 
to  tell  us  what  it  really  is.  Yolumes  issued  under  the  titles 
of  the  particular  sciences  might  be  filled  with  truths  and 
half-truths  without  exhausting  the  description  of  the  real 
being  of  the  most  commonplace  thing.  Nor  should  a  false 
shame  keep  us  from  declaring  what  a  true  reverence  com- 


KNOWLEDGE  AND  REALITY  541 

mends :  It,  too,  is  not  so  mean  and  obscure  a  thing  as  to  fail 
of  attaining  some  of  the  fundamental  qualifications  of  our  own 
selfhood.  And  as,  under  the  enthusiasm  over  that  wonder- 
ful inner  structure  which  modern  physico-chemical  science  so 
elaborately  describes,  we  seem  to  see  yet  further  into  each 
lowly  reality  consecrated  to  the  commonest  of  uses,  we 
do  no  indignity  to  the  Infinite  Will  that  is  the  core  of  all 
Reality  if  we  declare  its  self-realization  to  be  recognizable 
even  here. 

What  is  true  of  each  particular  thing  is  also  true  of  each 
event.  For  every  event  actually  is,  at  one  and  the  same  time, 
a  transaction  cognizable  from  an  indefinite  variety  of  points 
of  view.  Before  the  eye  of  every  beholder  the  stone  falls  to 
the  ground,  the  arrow  flies  toward  its  mark,  or  the  shooting 
star  sinks  exhausted  in  the  distant  horizon.  This  is  the  so- 
called  "  phenomenon,"  the  truth  of  reality  that  appears  to  the 
senses  from  their  characteristic  points  of  view.  But  either  of 
these  events  is  capable  of  being  regarded,  and  if  it  is  to  be 
known  in  the  fulness  of  its  actuality,  must  be  regarded,  from 
other  and  varied  scientific  points  of  view.  The  formulas  that 
express  the  laws  of  gravitation  and  of  the  resistance  of  the 
atmosphere,  and  whatever  is  known  of  the  great  cosmic 
forces  concerned  in  each  one  of  these  events,  do  not  contra- 
dict the  truth  that  is  in  the  phenomenon.  It  and  they  may, 
indeed,  be  so  stated  as  to  involve  themselves  in  seeming  con- 
tradiction. This  result  comes,  however,  because  error  or  half- 
truth  is  possible  in  such  judgments  as  are  pronounced,  from 
whatever  points  of  view.  But  the  reality  experiences  no  diffi- 
culty in  appearing  to  the  senses  in  one  way,  and  at  the  same 
time  and  in  the  same  transaction  being  known  to  science  in  a 
variety  of  other  ways.  Nor  do  the  truths  of  sense-perception 
and  of  science  conspire  together  with  an  agreement  to  offer 
common  opposition  to  him  who  will  regard  the  same  event  as 
an  item  of  Divine  Providence,  —  a  truly  aesthetical  or  ethical 
affair.  The  stroke  of  lightning  is  actually  seen  as  a  zigzag 


542  KNOWLEDGE  AND  REALITY 

line  of  blinding  light;  and  it  may  be  conceived  of  as  the 
behavior  of  an  electrical  current  according  to  its  own  laws,  — 
no  more,  and  yet  no  less,  if  we  conclude  also  to  regard  it  as 
the  messenger  of  the  Divine  purposes  in  the  execution  of  a 
great  World-plan.  Here,  again,  attention  must  be  recalled  to 
the  difference  in  the  grounds  and  in  the  character  of  the 
judgments  pronounced  from  these  different  points  of  view. 
What  is  claimed  is  this  :  They  may  all  alike  be  true ;  for 
Reality  has  enough  of  content  and  of  varied  forms  of  action 
to  satisfy  all. 

What  is  true  of  each  thing  and  of  every  event  is  emphati- 
cally and  necessarily  true  of  that  sum-total  of  Reality  which 
is,  always  very  partially  and  often  defectively  and  erroneously, 
given  to  human  cognition.  In  sense-perception  men  know  the 
truth  of  things  ;  the  real  being  and  the  actual  transactions 
of  the  existing  World  are  the  objects  of  cognition  through 
the  senses.  In  all  his  work-a-day  and  ordinary  consciousness 
of  what  is  under  his  eye  and  hand,  of  what  sounds  in  his  ears 
and  breathes  odors  upon  him  or  furnishes  the  gratification  of 
his  tastes,  every  man  stands  in  the  presence  of  Reality.  He 
knows  he  did  not  make  it,  nor  can  he  destroy  it.  He  regards 
the  statements  of  an  idealism  like  that  of  Schopenhauer,  for 
example,  as  no  better  than  the  ravings  of  a  madman.  These 
first  points  of  departure  and  lowest  stages  of  cognition  are, 
indeed,  exceedingly  obscure,  evanescent,  and  unrepresentable. 
Perception  is  a  first  witness  to  the  presence  of  truth,  —  trust- 
worthy but  dumb,  uncertain,  and  difficult  to  comprehend. 
Yet  heaven  and  earth  will  pass  away  before  men  will  believe 
that  it  does  not  speak  words  of  a  meaning  to  them  which  has 
other  origin  than  in  the  nature  of  their  own  sensibility  and 
object-constructing  mind.  For  cognition  of  the  world  of 
things  through  the  senses  is  essentially  trans-subjective  ;  it 
is  not  a  purely  subjective  affair,  but  an  actually  established 
relation  with  that  which  is  other  and  real. 

That  knowledge  of  the  world  of  things  which  comes  through 


KNOWLEDGE   AND  REALITY  543 

sense-perception  is  the  firm  basis  to  which  scientific  knowl- 
edge returns  again  and  again.  Scientific  knowledge  is  largely 
a  system  of  unseen  entities  and  generalized  modes  of  behavior 
which  the  intellect  constructs  in  the  effort  better  to  under- 
stand and  to  anticipate  the  repeated  cognition  of  things  by 
sense-perception.  It  has  already  been  shown  that  this  entire 
system  of  conceptions  and  judgments  is  unworthy  of  the 
name  of  knowledge,  unless  we  admit  the  postulate  that 
Reality  actually  is  quasi-rational,  and,  at  least  in  part,  teleo- 
logical.  Science,  in  other  words,  assumes  that  the  categories 
are  applicable  to  the  system  of  real  beings  and  actual  events 
with  which  it  aims  to  deal ;  this  assumption  is  the  prerequisite 
of  all  its  quest  after  the  truth  of  things.  But  all  its  progress, 

* 

on  the  other  hand,  is  a  perpetually  concrete  verification  of  the 
same  assumption.  For  Reality,  on  the  whole,  keeps  justifying 
the  assumption,  although  it  disappoints  many  of  the  hopes 
and  eludes  many  of  the  devices  of  the  scientific  inquirer.  For 
the  very  conception  and  the  reasoning  which  science  employs 
always  carry  with  them  the  postulate  of  the  transcendent. 
The  Reality  which  appears  as  so  related  to  us  in  sense- 
perception  that  we  can  speak  of  the  relation  in  terms  of  an 
envisagement,  appears  in  our  system  of  scientific  cognitions 
as  still  real  but  postulated  as  transcendent  and  yet  further 
known  by  complicated  and  valid  processes  of  inference.  The 
cognitions  of  science  do  not,  however,  contradict  those  of 
sense-perception  ;  for  the  really  existent  World,  as  known 
both  by  sense-perception  and  by  scientific  inference,  is  one 
and  the  same  World. 

Nor  does  the  philosophical  view  of  things  come  in  to  over- 
throw or  contradict  either  the  ordinary  or  the  scientific  view 
of  the  same  things.  That  insight  which  deciphers  the  inner 
nature  of  Nature  and  renders,  at  least  partially,  intelligible 
its  import  and  value,  does  not  despise  or  contravene  either  the 
knowledge  of  sense-perception  or  the  more  conceptual  and 
abstract  knowledge  of  the  natural  sciences.  "  It  results,"  says 


544  KNOWLEDGE   AND   REALITY 

Schopenhauer,1  "  from  this  whole  objective  consideration  of 
the  intellect  and  its  origin,  that  it  is  designed  for  the  compre- 
hension of  those  ends  upon  the  attainment  of  which  depends 
the  individual  life  and  its  propagation,  but  by  no  means  for 
deciphering  the  inner  nature  of  things  and  of  the  world  which 
exists  independently  of  the  knower."  This  despotic  dictum  of 
a  mind  professing  a  proud  scorn  both  for  common-sense  so 
called  and  for  science,  contains  an  important  epistemological 
truth.  This  truth  concerns  the  teleology  of  knowledge.  For 
our  cognitions  of  things,  as  they  are  won  by  every  man  in  that 
living  intercourse  and  work-a-day  commerce  with  reality  which 
actually  makes  up  the  existence  of  most  minds,  or  as  they  are 
refined,  elaborated,  and  made  apparently  to  undergo  a  total 
change  by  the  use  of  instrumentation,  and  by  Inference  of  a 
carefully  regulated  kind,  are  designed  for  the  attainment  of 
certain  ends.  These  ends,  however,  rise  to  heights  far  above 
those  described  by  Schopenhauer  as  the  life  of  the  individual 
—  a  mere  "  will  to  live  "  —  and  the  propagation  of  the  species. 
But  something  more  is  emphatically  true  of  the  knowledge 
both  of  ordinary  sense-perception  and  of  scientific  generaliza- 
tion ;  it  is  also  designed  for  "  deciphering  the  inner  nature  of 
things  and  of  the  world  that  exists  independently  of  the 
knower."  This  independently  existent  world  is  the  very  world 
known  by  the  "  plain  man's  "  consciousness  as  well  as  by  the 
more  systematic  and  highly  abstract  cognitions  of  science. 
The  germs  of  insight  into  the  "  inner  nature  of  things  "  lie 
waiting  recognition  and  development  in  every  human  mind. 
Every  man  is  a  metaphysician  and  a  philosopher ;  he  who  can 
say  homo  sum  is  forced  to  confess  both  an  interest  in  this 
inner  nature  and  an  undeveloped  potency  of  insight.  Nor  is 
the  insight  something  far  away  from  him,  —  "over  seas"  or 
"  up  aloft."  It  is  rather,  if  he  will  hear  it,  a  word  near  him, 
and  ready  to  be  put  into  his  own  mouth. 

Moreover,  men  generally  —  all  men,  as  soon  and  as  far  as 

l  World  as  Will  and  Idea  (English  translation),  iii.  p.  21. 


KNOWLEDGE   AXD   REALITY  545 

they  reach  the  reflective  stage  of  development  —  recognize  in 
every  natural  object  a  somewhat  that  goes  far  beyond  what  the 
senses  receive  as  a  quasi-passive  impression.  This  instinctive 
and  natural  recognition,  given  by  the  human  Self  to  the  other 
Self  which  is  immanent  in  each  individual  manifestation,  is 
the  source  both  of  the  worship  and  of  the  philosophy  of  Nature. 
It  was  shown  in  the  last  chapter  that  the  human  mind  can 
only  with  difficulty,  if  at  all,  regard  the  individual  thing  as 
not  answering  in  some  degree  and  manner  to  the  teleological 
principle.  A  more  detailed  metaphysical  discussion  would 
make  it  quite  clear  that  the  essential  being  of  every  thing 
consists  in  just  this,  that  the  series  of  its  changes,  whether 
regarded  as  self-determined  or  as  otherwise  determined,  com- 
ports with  certain  immanent  ideas.  As  long,  then,  as  human 
minds  and  the  things  which  are  the  objects  of  their  sense- 
perceptions  and  of  their  scientific  observations  and  inferences, 
are  constituted  thus  far  alike,  insight  into  "  the  world  which 
exists  independently  of  the  knower  "  cannot  be  wholly  denied 
to  those  minds.  The  feeling  of  awe  akin  to  reverence,  and 
of  mystery  that  is  allied  to  religious  faith,  with  which  crude 
peoples  regard  many  of  the  most  insignificant  of  natural 
objects,  is  a  witness  to  this  craving  of  human  nature.  The 
satisfaction  to  this  craving  which  the  more  reflective  knowl- 
edge of  all  such  objects  brings,  is  a  witness  to  the  power  of 
insight  in  all  men.  And  that  student  of  chemistry  or  biology 
who,  on  account  of  his  comparatively  petty  attainments  in  the 
laboratory,  has  parted  with  this  craving  and  its  satisfaction, 
or  who  has  ceased  from  the  feelings  of  awe  and  of  mystery 
before  the  things  he  daily  analyzes,  would  do  well  to  go  to 
school  to  the  "  child  of  nature."  But,  in  fact,  if  the  manhood 
of  the  knower  has  kept  any  sort  of  pace  in  its  development 
with  the  growth  of  his  technical  knowledge,  the  scientific 
observer  of  things  is  the  better  fitted  for  deciphering  the  inner 
nature  of  a  world  that  exists  in  independence  of  his  cognition. 

He  who  knows  things,  whether  by  the  senses  and  as  they  are 

35 


546  KNOWLEDGE   AND   REALITY 

adapted  to  the  ends  of  individual  life,  or  by  all  the  methods  of 
modern  science  and  as  a  system  of  interconnected  realities, 
but  fails  completely  of  this  "  insight,"  is  fatally  defective  in 
his  cognition :  He  does  not  know  things  as  they  really  are. 
Nor  does  he  need  to  cease  from  ordinary  sense-perception  or 
from  scientific  generalizations  in  order  to  add  to  his  knowl- 
edge the  truth  that  is  obvious  only  from  other  points  of  view ; 
for  things  themselves  are  rich  enough  in  content,  and  are 
actually  varied  enough  in  their  behavior  and  in  their  relations 
to  the  knower,  to  make  good  in  reality  all  the  demands  that 
are  made  upon  them. 

In  a  word,  if  we  may  speak  of  ordinary  knowledge,  scientific 
knowledge,  and  philosophical  knowledge,  as  three  distinguish- 
able kinds  of  cognition,  they  are  not  to  be  understood  as  in 
any  way  contradicting,  or  even  dispensing  with,  each  other. 
In  so  far  as  any  cognition  is  attained,  whether  by  the  use  of 
senses  and  intellect,  as  in  every  man's  daily  life,  or  by  scien- 
tific investigation,  or  by  reflection  upon  the  essential  consti- 
tution and  final  import  of  things,  it  is  all  valid  for  the  one 
Reality.  If  we  part  with  this  conviction  early  in  the  course 
of  our  epistemological  inquiry,  or  indeed  at  any  given  point 
along  its  path,  we  can  never  successfully  recover  it  again. 
Science  can  give  us  no  genuine  claim  to  know  what  is  the 
nature  of  the  really  existent  World,  after  the  senses  of  man 
have  been  pronounced  wholly  illusory  and  incapable  of  afford- 
ing any  such  knowledge.  Philosophy  cannot  introduce  its 
reflections  as  valid  means  for  deciphering  the  inner  nature 
of  things,  after  the  objective  consideration  of  the  intellect  as 
employed  in  the  constructions  of  science  has  resulted  in  a 
sceptical  idealism  or  in  agnosticism.  But  the  knowledge  of  or- 
dinary life,  of  science,  and  of  philosophy  is  all  needed  in  order 
to  fill  out  to  its  rounded  symmetry  the  cognitive  relation  of 
the  knower  to  the  real  being  and  the  actual  transactions  of 
things;  and  the  contradictions  which  this  diversity  of  cog- 
nitions from  different  points  of  view  seems  to  the  objector  to 


KNOWLEDGE  AND  REALITY  547 

introduce,  all  vanish  as  soon  as  it  appears  clear  what  is,  as 
thus  indicated  and  evinced,  the  nature  of  Reality.  For  it  then 
appears  that  Reality  itself  is,  what  in  all  these  ways  it  is 
known  to  be,  an  ever  active  and  infinitely  varied  Life  mani- 
festing itself  to  the  subject  of  cognition  in  indefinitely  varied 
ways. 

Another  list  of  misapprehensions  respecting  the  relation  of 
Knowledge  and  Reality  may  be  charged  to  incorrect  or  imper- 
fect conceptions  of  the  nature  of  "  cause,"  and  of  the  applica- 
tion of  the  causal  principle  to  concrete  experiences  generally. 
These  misapprehensions  are  either  positive  or  negative.  They 
consist  either  in  the  misapplication  of  some  subordinate 
form  of  the  causal  principle  to  the  relation  between  the 
cognitive  subject  and  Reality,  or  in  the  denial  of  the  appli- 
cation of  this  principle  in  any  form  to  the  same  relation. 
The  fuller  discussion  of  this  topic  also  belongs  to  the 
philosophy  of  mind  and  to  general  metaphysics;  but  certain 
observations  are  a  quite  indispensable  part  of  epistemological 
theory. 

No  other  conception  has  been  more  loosely  held  or  seduc- 
tively employed  than  the  conception  of  cause ;  and  no  other 
principle  needs  to  have  its  meaning  and  the  metaphysics  it 
carries  with  it  more  suspiciously  criticised  than  the  so-called 
principle  or  "  law  of  causation."  Science  and  philosophy  have 
striven,  within  their  own  domains  and  against  each  other,  so 
to  fix  its  meaning  as  to  give  to  some  peculiar  metaphysical 
theory,  or  even  to  the  denial  of  all  possibility  of  metaphysics, 
the  cogency  with  which  this  conception  and  this  principle 
are  supposed  to  rule  the  human  mind.  In  this  and  in  other 
writings,1  both  on  psychology  and  on  philosophy,  we  have  had 
repeated  occasion  to  rehearse  the  descriptive  history  of  its 
origin  and  to  show  its  varied  legitimate  or  illegitimate  uses. 
In  much  of  the  current  discussion  of  causation,  it  appears  as 

1  See  Introduction  to  Philosophy,  pp.  236  f. ;  Psychology,  Descriptive  and 
Explanatory,  chapters  xi.  and  xxi. ;  Philosophy  of  Mind,  chapters  vii.  and  viii.  ; 
and  the  present  Work,  chapter  x. 


548  KNOWLEDGE   AND   REALITY 

though  each  advocate  of  some  highly  specialized  metaphysics, 
whether  of  physics  or  of  mind,  supposed  himself  at  liberty  to 
restrict  and  define  the  significance  of  the  terms  employed 
at  his  own  good  pleasure.  The  supporter  of  a  mechanical 
theory  of  the  universe  argues  as  though  causal  problems  were 
mere  sums  in  mathematics.  The  biologist  or  psychologist,  of 
certain  tendencies  and  committed  to  certain  interests,  reduces 
all  causation  to  the  law  of  the  conservation  and  correlation  of 
energy  ;  and  this  in  spite  of  the  fact  that  he  cannot  make  the 
slightest  valid  pretence  of  accounting  in  this  way  for  the 
behavior  of  a  muscle-nerve  machine,  much  less  of  a  leucocyte 
when,  on  approaching  the  walls  of  a  blood-vessel,  it  throws 
out  a  pseudo-pod,  and  thus  penetrating  these  walls,  rallies  to 
the  defence  of  the  organism  against  its  enemies,  in  the  com- 
pany of  its  comrades,  upon  the  other  side  of  those  walls. 
Conservation  and  correlation  of  energy,  indeed  !  By  all  means 
let  the  physicist  use  his  appropriate  differentiation  of  the  uni- 
versal principle  which  binds  all  beings,  both  things  and  minds, 
into  a  living  unity,  in  those  relations  of  material  things  to 
one  another  to  which  he  empirically  demonstrates  it  to  be 
applicable.  But  if  the  causal  principle,  as  gathered  into  the 
law  of  gravitation,  does  not  account  for  the  behavior  of  mole- 
cules or  atoms,  why  should  it  seem  improbable  that  the  physi- 
cist's pet  form  of  the  same  universal  principle  should  fail  of 
legitimate  extension  to  all  changes  and  relations  of  living  and 
sentient  beings  ? 

The  variety  of  uses  given  to  the  conception  of  cause,  and 
the  different  forms  in  application  of  the  causal  principle,  are 
all  adequately  explained  in  the  light  of  its  own  origin  and 
development ;  it  is  itself  nothing  more  than  the  expression 
of  the  general  fact  of  some  sort  of  connection  amongst  all 
the  items  of  onr  experience.  Its  origin  has  been  shown  to  lie 
in  that  complex  of  cognitions  which  marks  the  earliest  inter- 
course of  the  Self  with  things,  as  knowing  itself  to  be  active 
in  the  pursuit  of  ends,  and  yet  restricted  and  determined  by 


KNOWLEDGE  AND  REALITY  549 

its  changing  relations  to  other  things.  In  this  complex  of 
cognitions  all  the  numerous  subordinate  classes  or  phases 
of  the  conception  of  cause  get  the  fullest  expression.  Out  of 
this  complex  of  cognitions,  as  it  develops  into  a  more  many- 
sided  and  symmetrical  body  of  cognitions,  these  classes  or 
phases  have  their  origin.  Such  of  them,  and  such  only, 
should  be  applied  to  the  relations  of  things  with  one  another, 
as  are  known  to  belong  to  things ;  and  to  each  peculiar  class 
of  relations  such  and  such  only  as  are  discovered,  in  the 
growth  of  human  knowledge,  to  be  actually  adapted  to  each 
class.  Relations  of  mere  quantity,  when  these  relations 
change,  may  possibly  be  expressed  in  terms  of  mere  quan- 
tity. But  in  other  relations,  quality  counts  and  even  domi- 
nates as  respects  the  form  given  to  the  causal  conception. 
Again,  ideas  and  final  purposes  and  deeds  of  will  count ;  they, 
too,  may  be  so  influential  as  quite  to  displace  any  of  those 
forms  of  conceiving  the  causal  relation  which  are  applicable 
only  to  masses  or  to  molecules  of  matter. 

What  is  in  general  true  of  all  attempts  at  an  application  of 
the  causal  principle  to  Reality  is  emphatically  true  when  the 
particular  class  of  applications  in  question  concerns  the  rela- 
tions, in  cognition,  between  some  particular  reality  and  the 
cognitive  mind.  Here  it  is  imperative  that  we  should  be  pre- 
cise in  both  our  affirmations  and  our  denials.  For  even  to 
speak  of  these  relations  as  causal,  in  certain  meanings  of  the 
word  "  causal,"  is  to  go  contrary  to  all  that  is  most  certainly 
known  about  the  nature  of  all  knowledge  ;  but  to  deny  that 
these  relations  are  causal,  in  certain  other  meanings  of  that 
same  word,  is  to  go  a  long  way  in  the  direction  of  undermin- 
ing the  validity  of  all  knowledge.  This  position,  as  both 
negative  in  its  guard  against  important  epistemological  and 
metaphysical  errors,  and  positive  in  its  assertion  of  important 
epistemological  and  metaphysical  truths,  will  now  be  briefly 
illustrated. 

Nothing  can  warrant  maintaining  —  either   openly  under 


550  KNOWLEDGE   AND   REALITY 

the  honorable  avowal  of  the  materialistic  hypothesis,  or  cov- 
ertly and  less  honorably  because  espousing  the  view  while 
disclaiming  the  name — a  "causal"  relation  between  the 
knower  and  any  other  reality  in  a  manner  to  imply  that  such 
other  reality  is  the  maker,  or  author,  or  producer,  or  real  sub- 
ject, of  the  cognition  itself.  I  know  that  the  cognitive  pro- 
cess, and  the  judgment  of  cognition  in  which  it  terminates,  is 
mine.  I,  and  no  other  being,  either  known  to  exist  or  con- 
ceivable as  existent  in  unknown  relations  to  me,  make  this 
judgment.  That  reality  which  I  know  as  my  Self  is  the 
author,  the  producer,  of  the  knowledge  which,  as  subjectively 
considered,  it  necessarily  attributes  to  itself.  That  self-con- 
sciousness, which  is  a  prerequisite  of  the  development  of  all 
knowledge,  is  the  perfectly  unimpeachable  authority  for  the 
assignment  of  the  knowledge  to  the  Self  as  its  subject ;  to  this 
Self  which  I  call  mine,  this  particular  cognition,  and  every 
other  cognition,  belongs  as  the  product  of  its  total  being  — 
intellect,  feeling,  and  will. 

And  no  other  being  stands  in  any  causal  relation  similar 
to  that  of  the  Self,  to  any  act  of  cognition.  The  knower 
knows  that  he,  and  he  alone,  is  the  maker  of  the  cognitive 
judgment,  and  the  subject  of  all  the  experiences  in  con- 
sciousness which  lead  up  to  this  judgment.  No  other  being 
can  be  conceived  of  as  standing  in  similar  causal  relation  to 
this  judgment.  Knowledge  cannot  be  conceived  of  as  the  prod- 
uct of  bodily  changes,  as  "  made  by  "  or  "  thrown  off  from  " 
the  brain ;  or  as  having  any  physico-chemical  changes  in  the 
cerebral  substance  furnish  the  subject  to  which  it  can  be 
attributed  as  to  an  initial  cause.  Every  explanation  of  a 
particular  cognition  which  omits  this  reference  to  the  subject 
as  the  real  being  whose  the  cognition  is,  fails  of  affording  a 
full  explanation  by  missing  the  most  essential  and  universal 
factor  in  all  cognition.  Even  by  evoking  the  most  extreme 
theories  of  "  divine  assistance  "  or  of  "  seeing  all  things  "  in 
God,  we  do  not  in  the  least  undermine  or  diminish  this  essen- 


KNOWLEDGE   AND  REALITY  551 

tial  "  moment"  of  all  human  knowledge.  Every  primary  fact 
of  knowledge,  no  matter  how  simple  and  primary,  must  be 
expressed  by  the  formula,  "  I  know ; "  and  this  formula  is 
rendered  meaningless  by  the  attempt  to  substitute  for  the 
subject  of  the  sentence  (for  the  "  /"  that  knows)  any  other 
being,  whether  conceived  of  in  terms  of  so-called  matter  or  of 
so-called  mind.  All  theories  which  break  down  the  invincible 
certainty  of  this  truth  of  cognition,  in  the  name  of  science, 
physiological  or  psychological,  juggle  with  words  that,  when 
brought  to  the  test  of  experience,  really  have  no  meaning; 
and  this  is  so  whether  these  theories  maintain  positive  or 
negative  positions  toward  the  main  problem  of  epistemology. 
/do  know;  and  I  cannot  conceive  of  my  knowledge  as  being 
produced  by  any  other  being  than  the  knower  who  claims  it 
for  his  own. 

But,  on  the  other  hand,  to  deny  all  causal  relation  whatever 
between  the  cognitive  subject  and  other  reality  is  equally, 
although  not  so  obviously,  unwarrantable.  And  here  we 
can  as  little  sympathize  with  the  squeamislmess  as  with  the 
audacity  which  so  widely  prevails.  All  the  ordinary  experience 
of  men  with  things  is  pledged  to  maintain  the  right  of  em- 
ploying the  causal  conception,  in  some  one  or  more  of  its 
several  significations,  to  express  actual  relations  between  their 
cognitions  and  the  real  being  and  actual  transactions  of 
things.  Changes  in  real  things  account  for,  explain,  deter- 
mine, and  are  in  different  ways  causally  related  to,  our  chang- 
ing cognitions.  The  blow  upon  my  skin,  or  the  burning  coal 
applied  to  it  —  an  actual  and  extra-mental  transaction  —  causes 
the  painful  cognition  of  my  own  body  as  struck  or  burned. 
The  various  phases  through  which  my  cognitive  consciousness 
runs,  as  I  watch  some  connected  series  of  events  or  some 
long-continued  process  in  the  external  world,  are  known  as 
dependently  connected  with  that  series  or  process  regarded  as 
a  trans-subjective  affair.  Nor  do  I  really  in  the  least  alter 
the  state  of  the  case  when,  by  prolonged  study  of  psycho- 


552  KNOWLEDGE  AND  REALITY 

physics,  I  assume  myself  to  be  wiser  than  most  men  are,  con- 
cerning the  more  immediate  and  hidden  antecedents  of  my 
changes  of  cognitive  consciousness.  Speaking  in  the  name 
of  "  science  "  (what  name  more  abused  than  this  ?),  and  tak- 
ing on  lofty  airs  of  superior  information,  does  not  accomplish 
a  deliverance  from  those  necessities  of  intellect  and  imagi- 
nation which  characterize  all  human  knowledge.  "  Cerebral 
states  "  remain  nothing  but  hypothetical  changes  in  an  inferred 
reality,  interjected  between  changes  directly  observed  in  exter- 
nal things  and  correlated  changes  in  our  own  cognitive  con- 
sciousness. If  they  explain  these  known  conscious  changes, 
then  they  must  themselves  be  conceived  of  as  actual  transac- 
tions in  some  really  existent  thing,  that  is  not  known  as  part 
of  the  Self,  —  in  this  case,  the  substance  of  the  cerebral  areas. 
If  there  are  such  actual  changes  in  real  things,  and  if  these 
changes  actually  explain  the  changes  in  the  conscious  states 
of  cognition,  then  the  former  trans-subjective  changes  must, 
in  some  sense  of  the  word,  be  the  "  causes  "  of  the  latter  and 
subjective  changes.  For  this  is  precisely  what  we  inevitably 
mean  by  the  very  word  "  cause,"  in  the  most  common  of  its 
several  meanings.  Indeed,  one  of  the  most  fundamental  and 
useful  of  the  laws  governing  the  scientific  search  after  causal 
relations  may  be  stated  thus  :  If  the  being  A  (the  cognizing 
agent)  regularly  passes  through  the  series  of  changes  A,  Aa, 
A&,  A**,  in  sequence  upon  the  observed  or  inferred  changes  of 
the  other  being  B  (the  brain)  in  the  series  B,  J5%  £b,  Bc,  then 
the  latter  series  is,  at  least,  a  part  of  the  cause  of  the  former. 
In  vain  does  the  science  of  physiological  psychology  —  out 
of  an  artificial  and  uncomely  regard  for  the  universal  integrity 
of  certain  physical  principles  of  a  quite  limited  applica- 
bility, or  for  other  similar  considerations  —  strive  to  escape 
the  obligation  which  its  own  discoveries  impose  upon  it.  To 
substitute  other  terms  for  the  word  "  cause  "  when,  after  all, 
you  really  mean  cause,  is  but  a  subterfuge  that  advances  no 
genuine  scientific  interest.  The  resort  to  a  theory  of  psycho- 


KNOWLEDGE  AND  REALITY  553 

physical  parallelism  introduces,  in  the  alleged  interests  of 
scientific  explanation,  a  view  that,  essentially  considered,  is  a 
violation  of  every  canon  of  genuine  science  ;  logically  carried 
out,  it  results  in  undermining  the  entire  foundations  of  intel- 
lect by  separating  it  from  all  real  connection  with  the  transac- 
tions that  go  on  in  the  world  of  things. 

But  why  hesitate  to  use  the  word  "  causal,"  with  the  proper 
limitations,  to  express  the  relations  between  the  cognitive 
mind  and  those  changes  in  things  which  stand  in  most  inti- 
mate connection  with  the  mind  ?  Is  any  ethical  interest  liable 
to  injury  thereby  ?  Is  it  a  crime  for  Reality  to  have  a  decisive 
influence  in  determining  what  I  shall  know  to  be  true ;  espe- 
cially when  the  apparent  object  of  my  knowledge  is  mentally 
represented  as  some  phase  of  or  transaction  in,  this  Reality 
itself  ?  If  my  cognitions  were  not  dependent  upon  the  real 
being  and  actual  transactions  of  things,  and  somehow  cau- 
sally determined  by  them,  how  should  I  ever  know  the  truth 
of  things?  If  any  degradation  is  suffered  by  my  cognitive 
faculty  in  thus  being  dependent  upon  the  causal  efficacy  of 
those  physico-chemical  processes  which  I  call  "  my  brain- 
states,"  the  remedy  for  this  would  seem  to  be  in  my  not  being 
an  animal  at  all,  rather  than  in  resorting  to  a  theory  which 
makes  a  complete  breach  between  my  mentality  and  my  ani- 
mality.  In  fact,  however,  most  of  the  modern  advocates  of 
the  theory  of  psycho-physical  parallelism  do  not  appear  to  be 
chiefly  mindful  of  its  ethical  outcome  or  of  the  unhappy 
position  in  which  it  places  the  human  soul  —  cut  off,  as  it 
were,  from  all  valid  connection  with  the  world  of  Nature,  and 
left  to  manufacture  and  put  on  sale  a  commodity  which  is 
labelled  "  knowledge,"  but  is  utterly  devoid  of  the  most 
essential  characteristics  of  genuine  knowledge.  The  extreme 
tenderness  with  which  the  principle  of  causation  is  applied, 
in  any  form,  to  the  relations  of  body  and  mind,  is  customarily 
due  simply  to  reverence  for  that  peculiar  conception  of  the 
principle  which  applies  to  certain  branches  of  physics  alone. 


554  KNOWLEDGE  AND  REALITY 

But  that  conception  of  cause  which  has  its  origin  in  experience, 
and  which  experience  justifies,  is  elastic  enough  to  cover  these 
relations  too  ;  and,  on  the  other  hand,  it  refuses  to  cover 
these  relations  in  such  a  way  as  to  invalidate  no  small  part  of 
our  most  trustworthy  cognitions. 

In  brief,  then,  we  may  —  nay,  we  must  —  conceive  of  the 
mind  which  has  the  cognition,  and  of  the  things  which  are 
objects  of  its  cognition,  as  standing  together  in  one  causally 
connected  system.  This  system  we  necessarily  conceive  of  as 
including  a  great  variety  of  beings  that  are,  considered  from 
one  point  of  view,  self-determining  or  active  in  ways  corre- 
sponding to  their  respective  natures;  and  yet  all  of  them, 
minds  and  things,  are  conceived  of  only  as  they  are  manifestly 
parts  of  the  one  system.  Reality  is  thus  known  as  a  vast 
complex ;  in  which  knowledge  emerges  as  a  forthputting  of 
mind  in  its  varied  causal  relations  to  other  forms  of  reality. 
The  transcendency,  or  trans-subjective  application  of  the 
category  of  relation  is,  therefore,  an  essential  presupposition 
of  the  very  existence  of  cognition.  And  all  particular  rela- 
tions, inasmuch  as  they  are  all  realized  only  as  belonging  to 
that  complex  system  of  Reality  in  which  the  cognitive  mind 
has  its  life  of  doing  and  suffering,  may  be  said  to  exemplify 
some  form  of  the  causal  principle.  To  exist  as  a  mind  is 
consciously  to  do  and  to  suffer ;  and  to  know,  as  the  human 
mind  is  capable  of  knowledge,  is  to  become  aware  of  the 
doings  and  sufferings  of  the  Self,  and  of  Things  that  are  not- 
self,  in  their  reciprocal  relations  of  interdependence.  Only 
here,  the  sphere  of  the  Reality  that  is  not  included  in  our 
self-known  Self  is  far  larger  and  firmer  in  its  consistency,  as 
it  were,  than  the  sphere  of  that  reality  which  is  known  as  the 
Self.  All  this  amounts  to  saying  that  the  very  existence  of 
our  cognitive  activities,  and  of  the  products  which  mark  their 
development,  whether  for  the  individual  or  for  the  race,  rests 
upon  the  general  assumption  that  things  and  minds  do  so 
causally  determine  each  other  as  to  show  that  they  belong  to 
one  system  of  Reality. 


KNOWLEDGE  AND  REALITY  555 

Within  certain  limits,  for  example,  the  speed,  intensities, 
and  range  of  the  changes  of  minds  and  things  admit  of  be- 
ing compared  in  terms  of  number.  Within  certain  other 
ranges,  they  admit  of  being  more  concretely  represented  as 
qualitative  and  quantitative  rearrangements,  adapted  to  cer- 
tain ends  that  are  more  or  less  clearly  perceived  as  ends. 
Within  certain  other  limits  they  seem  to  admit  of  being  stated 
in  terms  that  have  for  both  minds  and  things  an  ethical  and 
sesthetical  value.  Within  all  these  limits  and  ranges,  how- 
ever, and  whatever  may  be  the  differences  of  qualification 
which  we  are  obliged  to  recognize,  we  must  never,  on  the 
one  hand,  so  conceive  of  their  relation  as  to  sink  the  reality 
of  either  in  the  reality  of  the  other,  nor,  on  the  other  hand,  so 
deny  all  valid  relation  and  connection  between  the  two  as  to 
invalidate  the  actual  unity  of  the  system  to  which  both  be- 
long. Whether  this  Unity  is  complete  or  not,  we  may  be 
unable  to  say.  What  we  do  know  is  that  its  extension  is  co- 
terminous with,  is  indeed  the  presupposition  of,  all  extension 
of  human  knowledge.  And  what  the  Nature  of  this  Unity 
is,  the  resources  of  philosophy  in  its  branch  of  metaphysics 
must  be  summoned  to  discover  as  its  own  profound  problem. 

It  is,  therefore,  both  true  to  the  facts  of  the  case  and  in 
accordance  witli  a  true  theory  of  knowledge,  when  the  rela- 
tions of  the  knower  and  the  things  known  are  represented 
in  various  ways,  as  applicable  to  different  kinds  of  knowledge 
and  to  different  forms  of  functioning  in  the  process  of  cogni- 
tion. For  example,  the  relation  of  the  molecular  excitement, 
caused  by  various  forms  of  physical  energy  within  the  senso- 
riuni  to  the  changing  scries  of  sensory  modifications  of  con- 
sciousness is  best  represented  by  speaking  of  the  former  as 
the  " stimulus"  or  occasional  cause,  of  the  latter.  This  par- 
ticular relation  is,  on  the  contrary,  not  truthfully  represented 
when  it  is  either  spoken  of  as  a  producing  cause  or  as  a  mere 
disconnected  concomitance  of  a  phenomenal  kind.  Again, 
the  relation  of  the  different  modifications  of  consciousness 


556  KNOWLEDGE  AND  REALITY 

to  the  Ego  is  truthfully  representable  only  by   some   such 
terms  as  " subject "  and  " state" 

Moreover,  the  different  factors  of  that  total  activity  or  con- 
dition of  consciousness  which  is  called  "  knowledge  "  stand  in 
various  relations  both  to  the  subject  and  to  the  object  of  knowl- 
edge ;  and  these  various  relations  need  for  the  most  fitting 
mental  representation  a  variety  of  terms.  As  a  merely  feel- 
ing Self  my  relation  to  Reality  is  not  the  same  as  that  which 
I  sustain  when  considered  as  a  willing  or  a  thinking  Self. 
But,  then,  in  my  knowledge  of  the  real  being  and  the  actual 
transactions  of  things  I  am  never  merely  a  feeling,  or  a  will- 
ing, or  a  thinking  Self.  So,  too,  the  relations  which  I  sustain 
to  the  object  of  my  cognition  need  several  terms,  rather  than 
one  term  only,  in  order  truthfully  to  express  my  experience. 
When  this  object  is  some  present  state  of  the  Self,  regarded 
as  self-consciously  known,  the  term  "  envisagement"  or  "  in- 
tuition" is  needed  to  express  the  immediacy,  the  "  face-to- 
face  "  nature  of  the  relation.  But  when  what  I  know  is  a 
proposition  in  geometry  that  reposes  upon  a  complicated 
demonstration,  or  a  generalized  fact  in  physical  science,  or  a 
historical  statement,  the  relation  in  which  I  stand  to  my  ob- 
ject is  not  properly  represented  in  the  same  way.  To  object 
to  the  statement  that  the  reality  known  may  be  regarded  as 
" inferred"  or  " believed  in"  is  virtually  to  deny  that  actual 
variety  in  the  life  of  the  mind  which  it  displays  in  its  rela- 
tions to  the  various  objects  of  its  knowledge. 

Nor  is  there  any  obscurity  or  inconsistency  in  admitting  a 
variety  of  relations  between  Reality  and  Knowledge,  but  just 
the  contrary.  Obscurity  begins  when  the  attempt  is  made 
to  generalize  unwarrantably ;  and  then,  upon  the  basis  of 
such  a  generalization  to  force  one  set  of  abstractions  upon 
the  life  of  the  mind  so  as  to  make  its  actual  complexity  con- 
form to  the  barren  thinking  and  meagre  imagination  of  some 
psychological  or  metaphysical  theory.  But  who  shall  deter- 
mine a  priori  that  the  human  soul  cannot,  in  and  through 


KNOWLEDGE  AND  REALITY  557 

cognition,  stand  in  just  this  living  diversity  of  relations  toward 
Reality  ?  As  though,  indeed,  Reality  itself  were  too  poor  in 
content,  and  in  its  outgivings  and  forthputtings  too  stingy  to 
offer  itself  to  the  mind  of  man  in  a  rich  and  generous  diver- 
sity of  relations ! 

What  question  is  more  pertinent  to  such  a  case  than  this : 
In  what  experience  do  all  the  different  forms  of  relation,  con- 
sidered as  mere  mental  functioning,  themselves  arise?  In 
other  words,  where  does  the  category  of  relation,  with  such 
differentiations  and  shadings  as  it  really  undergoes  in  the 
life  of  men,  itself  originate  ?  Of  course  in  men's  experience  as 
subjects  of  knowledge.  In  so  far,  then,  as  knowledge,  on  the 
one  hand,  is  a  relating  activity  and,  on  the  other  hand,  impli- 
cates Reality,  it  may  be  expected  that  the  different  forms  of 
relation  will  find  their  justification  and  validating  in  knowl- 
edge. But  this  is  only  the  presumption  which  all  human  ex- 
perience ratifies  and  illustrates ;  for  in  knowledge  the  mind 
finds  itself  actually  assuming  all  these  forms  of  relation 
toward  Reality. 

Finally,  we  inquire  whether  there  is  any  way  of  summariz- 
ing an  epistemological  doctrine  of  Knowledge  and  Reality  so 
as  briefly  to  express  the  truth  of  the  experience  in  which  men 
appear  to  themselves  to  sustain  this  variety  of  relations. 
I,  as  cognizing  subject,  am  set  into  manifold  forms  of  depen- 
dence and  of  intercourse  with  a  system  of  beings,  both  minds 
and  things.  How  shall  I  best  represent  to  myself  the  essen- 
tial features  of  all  these  manifold  forms  of  relation,  as  they 
emerge  to  my  consciousness  in  the  unfolding  life  of  the  mind  ? 
In  the  attempt  to  answer  this  question,  a  certain  reserve,  or 
even  modesty,  of  opinion  is  becoming ;  and  whether  the 
question  can  be  answered  or  not,  the  firmly  established  facts 
in  which  the  trial  for  an  answer  originates  must  not  be  over- 
looked or  their  full  value  and  significance  sacrificed.  Error 
here,  however,  is  likeliest  to  arise  in  unduly  restricting  our 
views  of  the  life  of  Knowledge  and  of  the  nature  of  Reality, 


558  KNOWLEDGE  AND   REALITY 

rather  than  in  careful  attempts  to  expand  and  to  elevate  these 
views.  A  large  faith  in  the  higher  insights  of  humanity  is 
better  adapted  to  lead  one  to  the  truth  than  is  a  shrinking 
scepticism  or  a  despairing  agnosticism.  It  is,  then,  our  faith 
in  reason  which  is  pledged  to  the  answer  of  this  problem  ;  — 
but  only  if  the  answer  can  be  so  understood  and  defended  as 
to  admit  of  all  the  facts  and  truths  which  an  epistemological 
examination  has  brought  to  light.  We  believe  there  is  one 
figurative  and  yet  valid  and  true  way  of  representing  the  es- 
sential features  of  the  relation  of  Knowledge  and  Reality, — 
one  and  only  one  valid  and  true  way.  Human  cognition  is 
all  to  be  understood  as  a  species  of  intercourse  between  minds. 
In  all  man's  knowledge  the  real  being  of  the  finite  Self  is  in 
actual  commerce  with  the  Absolute  Self.  This  relation  of 
an  intercourse  between  Selves  is  the  one  fundamental  and 
permanent  conception  under  which  may  be  truthfully  included 
all  the  particular  forms  of  relation  of  which  we  have  experi- 
ence in  the  development  of  the  life  of  cognition. 


CHAPTER  XIX 

IDEALISM  AND  REALISM 

WHAT  theory  of  Reality  best  accords  with  the  plainest 
facts  and  the  more  obvious  laws  of  man's  life  of 
cognition  ?  This  is  a  question  with  which  epistemology  may 
attempt  briefly  to  deal;  for,  as  has  already  been  shown, 
although  this  question  is  obliged  to  borrow  from  metaphysics 
certain  views  as  to  the  nature  of  things,  it  borrows  these 
views  in  order  the  more  profoundly  to  comprehend  the  nature 
of  Knowledge.  And  when  the  completer  discussions  of  onto- 
logical  problems  which  is  the  business  of  metaphysics,  ask 
a  return  of  the  loan,  it  may  be  repaid  with  accumulation  of 
interest. 

Such  an  answer  to  the  question  just  raised  as  our  previous 
discussions  enable  us  to  give,  shows  how  each  of  the  more 
prominent  ontological  theories  is  checked  and  corrected,  as 
soon  as  it  develops  a  tendency  to  proceed  to  extremes,  by  a 
true  and  comprehensive  philosophy  of  knowledge.  In  their 
eagerness  to  obtain  logical  consistency  and  argumentative 
clearness  for  themselves,  Idealism  and  Realism,  Dualism  and 
Monism,  are  accustomed  to  override  the  considerations  which 
naturally  and  fitly  suggest  moderation,  and  even  a  complete 
change  in  the  point  of  view,  before  settling  definitely  the  prob- 
lem of  universal  Being.  Each  one  of  these  two  pairs,  as  against 
the  other  of  the  same  pair,  has  valid  claims  to  present.  These 
claims  are  valid,  for  they  rest  upon  foundations  of  assured 
knowledge.  When  pressed  into  a  conflict  with  opposing  or 
contradictory  claims,  if  their  forces  are  handled  by  a  com- 


560  IDEALISM  AND  REALISM 

mander  skilled  in  brilliant  dialectic,  they  may  appear  to 
emerge  from  the  conflict  quite  victorious.  A  complete  con- 
quest and  systematic  subjugation  and  exploration  of  the  en- 
tire realm  of  Being  is  then  announced ;  and  one  of  these  four 
titles,  spelled  with  imposing  capitals,  is  forthwith  proclaimed 
Conqueror  and  Dictator  over  the  whole  domain.  But  this 
boasted  freedom  from  "  inconsistency  "  and  "  obscurity  "  may 
prove  only  a  poor  and  temporary  reward  for  the  neglect  or  the 
slaughter  of  facts  and  laws  that  were,  at  the  beginning,  most 
loyally  arrayed  on  the  other  side.  Nor  is  this  kind  of  "  paci- 
fication "  likely  to  be  more  than  superficial  and  short-lived. 
Indeed,  as  will  now  briefly  be  shown,  every  one  of  these  four 
theoretical  constructions  of  all  Reality,  when  it  becomes  dis- 
regardful  of  the  legitimate  claims  of  the  opposed  construc- 
tion, conducts  itself  in  such  a  way  as  to  suffer  arrest  and 
legal  execution  at  the  hand  of  epistemology. 

Idealism  and  Realism,  in  whatever  form  presented,  are 
always  the  ontological  correlates  of  certain  assured  facts  and 
laws  of  human  knowledge.  We  know  what  warrants  both 
these  views  as  to  the  nature  of  minds  and  of  things.  Indeed, 
the  "  I  know "  in  which  the  epistemological  problem  origi- 
nates in  its  most  presuppositionless  form  contains  within 
itself  the  perpetual  warrant  for  the  truth  seized  upon  and 
expressed  by  both  these  theories.  But  both  Idealism  and 
Realism,  whenever  they  begin  to  overlook  or  to  pervert  the 
plain  significance  of  the  facts  that  oppose  their  unrestricted 
extension,  become  so  involved  in  a  sceptical  and  agnostic 
view  of  some  knowledge  as  really  to  destroy  the  grounds  for  a 
rational  confidence  in  all  knowledge. 

Let  us  begin  with  the  position  of  subjective  idealism, — 
unassailable  so  far  as  it  is  aflfirmatory  and  positive.  I  know 
my  own  affections,  all  the  thoughts,  feelings,  and  purposes 
which  I  call  mine.  Those  objects  of  my  cognition,  which  are 
called  external  things,  are  certainly  given  to  me  only  as  they 
are  in  consciousness  and  in  my  consciousness  ;  they  are,  from 


IDEALISM  AND  REALISM  561 

this  point  of  view,  as  truly  subjective  as  are  the  most  subjec- 
tive of  my  own  experiences.  For  my  sensations  are  nothing 
external  to  my  mind  ;  nor  can  they  be  regarded  as  copies  of, 
or  impressions  derived  from  anything  external.  They  are, 
positively,  nothing  but  modifications  of  my  sensory  conscious- 
ness. And  even  if  a  certain  qualification  called  "  extensity," 
or  undefined  "  bigness,"  be  allowed  to  the  sensations  of  certain 
orders,  or  even  to  sensations  of  every  order,  their  inherent 
subjectivity  is  in  no  wise  altered.  Such  sensations,  however 
qualified  extensively,  are  still  my  sensations,  subjective  modi- 
fications of  my  sensory  consciousness.  Neither  do  they  lose 
this  subjectivity  by  being  combined  into  manifold  so-called 
"  sensation-complexes ; "  for  no  potency  can  be  detected  in 
mere  combination  which  should,  like  the  philosopher's  stone, 
change  the  baser  metal  of  subjective  sensibility  into  the  gold 
of  envisaged  extra-mental  reality.  And  now  if  we  are  at  a 
loss  to  understand  how  mere  subjective  modifications  of  sen- 
suous consciousness  can  come  even  to  appear  as  things 
objective,  we  may  introduce  either  the  Kantian  theory  of 
knowledge,  or  some  other  equally  idealistic  theory ;  thus  the 
objectivity  which  things  appear  to  have  is  itself  ascribed  to 
the  laws  of  the  activity  of  my  own  mind. 

My  cognition  of  objects,  no  matter  how  intellectual  and 
comprehending  it  may  become,  is  still  a  passing  phase  of 
my  consciousness.  The  realities  called  "  Things  "  are  really 
phenomena  in  the  ever  flowing  stream  of  my  mental  life ; 
they  are  to  me  as  they  appear  to  me,  —  pictures  in  the  mind, 
or  forms  of  mental  representation.  And  what  is  true  of  those 
objects  which  at  least  make  the  claim  to  be  considered  real  — 
namely,  that  they  appear  concretely  in  my  life  of  mental 
sense-presentation  —  is  a  fortiori  true  of  all  conceptual  objects. 
The  so-called  entities  and  laws  of  science,  so  far  as  they  exist 
for  me,  whether  conceived  of  as  immediately  appertaining 
to  my  conscious  experience  or  only  as  most  remotely  con- 
nected therewith,  are  alike  only  my  ideas  and  thoughts. 

30 


562  IDEALISM  AND  REALISM 

Being  more  abstract  than  are  the  perceptions  from  which 
they  spring,  they  have  even  less  tenable  claim  to  be  exempted 
from  the  universal  dictum:  Things  and  their  relations  and 
their  transactions  are  ideas,  —  "  momenta  "  in  the  ever  mov- 
ing stream  of  consciousness.  Nor,  finally,  can  this  Self,  and 
all  the  higher  spiritual  existences  in  which  it  believes  and 
to  communion  with  which  it  so  ardently  and  persistently  as- 
pires, fail  of  being  brought  under  the  same  truth.  I  am  to 
myself  my  own  idea,  my  own  conception.  Other  spirits, 
men,  angels,  and  God,  are  existent  for  me,  as  the  flow 
of  consciousness,  under  the  constitutional  or  acquired  norms 
of  understanding  determines  momentarily  that  they  shall  be. 
"  The  World  is  my  Idea,"  —  who  can  resist  the  logic  which 
proves,  or  the  impressiveness  of  the  metaphysics  which  pro- 
claims, this  celebrated  dictum? 

So  long  as  subjective  idealism  states  its  position  in  a 
purely  affirmative  way,  and  refrains  from  denial  of  the  other 
aspects  and  truths  of  cognition,  it  commands  assent ;  because 
it  is  psychologically  defensible.  But  if  not  (as  is  customary) 
in  its  elementary  and  positive  statements,  then  in  its  more 
ulterior  and  negative  developments  its  case  is  far  differently 
decided  at  the  bar  of  a  judicial  epistemology.  Grown  con- 
ceited with  its  triumphs  in  psychology,  it  attempts  a  philoso- 
phy of  knowledge  and  a  theory  of  Reality  as  follows  :  Nothing 
is,  or  can  be,  known  as  aught  but  my  idea.  I  am  shut  in, 
without  conceivable  means  or  imagined  possibility  of  escape, 
by  the  circle  of  my  mental  representations.  And  if  you 
allege  as  existing  in  fact,  or  propose  as  tenable  in  theory, 
some  means  of  transcending  this  circle,  you  allege  or  propose 
the  impossible.  "  Envisagement,"  "  inference,"  "  faith,"  — 
what  are  these,  or  any  other  similar  terms,  but  words  for 
some  actual  or  fictitious  form  of  the  idea  ?  Can  I,  in  know- 
ing, transcend  the  consciousness  whose  peculiar  form  the 
very  process  of  knowing  is  ?  All  concrete  cognition  is  noth- 
ing but  appearance ;  and  that  which  appears  in  every  cogni- 


IDEALISM   AND  REALISM  563 

tive  act  is  nothing  but  my  idea  ?  How,  then,  can  so-called 
Things  be  known  to  me  as  other  than  my  own  ideas  ?  Or, 
if  it  must  be  admitted  —  albeit  most  tardily  and  in  surrepti- 
tious and  shame-faced  fashion  —  that  some  extra-mental  real- 
ity is,  some  thing  other  than  my  ideas,  how  can  I  ever 
hope  to  know,  or  even  venture  to  conjecture,  what  this  some- 
thing is,  —  since  what  it  is  to  me  is  ever  only  my  idea  ?  The 
reduction  of  my  ideas  to  as  much  as  possible  of  apparent 
consistency  among  themselves,  and  the  pursuit  of  practical 
ends  by  the  problematical  means  left  at  my  disposal,  would 
seem  to  be  the  only  attainable  end  of  cognition  in  a  case  like 
mine. 

We  have  seen,  however,  that  this  subjective  idealism,  with 
its  sceptical  or  agnostic  outcome  respecting  the  real  being 
and  actual  transactions  of  things,  and,  indeed,  respecting  also 
the  reality  of  the  soul,  is  met  and  disproved,  in  its  negative 
positions,  by  the  psychology  and  the  philosophy  of  knowledge 
at  every  point.  Its  affirmations  can,  indeed,  be  pieced  to- 
gether so  as  to  afford  to  a  few  minds  a  seductive  picture  of 
the  truth.  But  its  denials  can  never  win  their  way  either 
with  the  popular,  or  with  the  more  reflective  views  upon 
the  nature  of  cognition,  and  of  the  Reality  in  possession  of 
which  the  cognitive  soul  is  placed.  The  brilliant  dialectic 
of  Berkeley,  and  of  his  exceedingly  infrequent  later  disciples, 
will  always  find  itself  wholly  unable  to  cope  with  the  "  com- 
mon-sense" of  mankind.  For  although  this  common-sense 
is  no  adequate  equipment  for  philosophical  pursuits,  it  cannot 
be  flouted  at  or  neglected  by  any  form  of  philosophical  theory. 
That  detailed  analysis  of  the  nature,  the  criteria,  and  the 
"  implicates  "  of  all  knowledge  with  which  we  have  attempted 
to  answer  the  epistemological  problem,  has  shown,  not  only 
the  serious  defects,  but  also  the  complete  absurdity  of  sub- 
jective idealism.  All  knowledge  is,  in  its  very  nature  trans- 
subjective.  Its  fundamental  affirmation  —  an  affirmation  from 
which  it  never  for  a  single  moment,  or  so  much  as  in  one 


564  IDEALISM  AND  REALISM 

lonely  instance,  departs  —  is  of  the  extra-mentally  existent. 
Knowledge  is  not  merely  an  appearance  in  consciousness  of 
ideas ;  it  is  a  living  commerce  with  the  real  being  and  actual 
transactions  of  minds  and  of  things. 

Moreover,  this  form  of  idealism  cannot  state  its  positions, 
cannot  even  open  its  mouth  to  proclaim  or  to  whisper  them 
forth,  without  confession  of  its  own  complete  absurdity.  Its 
very  profession  is  such  a  confession.  For  its  profession  is  an 
appeal  to  some  standard  of  truth  that  exists,  realized  somehow 
and  somewhere,  outside  the  flow  of  the  ideas  in  the  stream  of  the 
individual  consciousness.  And  if,  at  first,  this  standard  is  con- 
ceived of  as  the  simultaneous  and  concurrent  flow  of  other 
ideas,  in  other  streams  of  consciousness  than  my  own,  even 
this  is  a  confession  of  faith  in  an  eotfra-mentally  existent  world 
that  is  not  merely  my  idea.  But  the  confession  implied  in 
the  profession  of  subjective  idealism  is  always  something 
much  more  than  this.  For  it  is  only  through  my  cognition 
of  a  system  of  things,  "  not-self"  that  I  come  even  to  suspect 
the  existence  of  a  standard  of  truth.  All  the  earliest  devel- 
opment of  knowledge,  as  has  been  sufficiently  emphasized, 
is  an  unceasing  commerce  of  Self  with  Things,  known  as 
mutually  dependent  and  interrelated.  It  is  as  part  of  a  real 
world,  cognized  only  on  such  terms  as  prevent  my  consider- 
ing it  to  be  merely  my  mental  representation,  that  I  have 
come  to  know  even  my  ideas  as  my  own.  The  very  nature  of 
my  knowledge,  therefore,  inevitably  compels  me  to  the  con- 
tradictory of  the  solipsistic  position ;  it  compels  the  conclu- 
sion, "  The  world  is  not  merely  my  idea."  It  is  all,  always, 
known  to  me  as  something  other  and  more  than  my  idea. 
In  vain  does  the  advocate  of  this  kind  of  idealism,  when  im- 
paled upon  the  spear-points  of  an  array  of  epistemological 
facts,  strive  to  extricate  himself  and  retain  enough  of  life 
in  his  dialectic  to  carry  him  either  forward  or  backward. 
Forward  he  cannot  go,  for  the  facts  are  invincible.  Back- 
ward he  cannot  retreat  to  the  idealistic  position  from  which  he 


IDEALISM  AND  REALISM  565 

set  out ;  the  facts  follow  and  rout  him  even  there.  They  show 
that  while  the  objects  of  every  form  and  degree  of  knowledge 
may  all  properly  be  considered  as  ideas  (in  the  most  general 
sense  of  this  word,  as  appearances  in  consciousness),  they 
must  all  be  considered  also  as  not  mere  ideas,  as  trans- 
subjective,  as  really  existent  minds  and  things.  Nor  will  the 
continuance  of  the  distressing  ambiguity  in  the  Kantian  use 
of  the  word  "  objective  "  save  the  metaphysics  of  subjective 
idealism  from  the  attacks  of  the  realism  which  epistemology 
warrants. 

Common-sense  Realism,  too,  in  its  naive  and  homely  fashion, 
affirms  certain  important  truths  which  are  confirmed  by  the 
conclusions  of  a  critical  theory  of  knowledge.  When,  how- 
ever, it  contradicts  or  overlooks  those  facts  and  laws  which 
are  emphasized  by  its  rival  theory  of  reality,  it  is  opposed  and 
confuted  by  epistemology.  If  this  form  of  realism  never  be- 
comes quite  so  palpably  absurd  as  does  subjective  idealism,  its 
salvation  is  perhaps  due  to  the  fact  that  what  is  "  common- 
sense  "  always  feels  certain  constraints  from  which  more  scho- 
lastic and  exquisitely  refined  speculations  are  apt  to  fly  free. 
The  cruder  realism  takes  its  original  position  in  the  uncritical 
affirmation  of  a  knowledge  of  things ;  both  that  they  are  and 
what  they  are,  it  is  assumed,  without  asking  permission  of 
psychology  and  philosophy,  everybody  knows.  That  things 
do  really  exist,  extra-mentally  and  in  independence  of  me  and 
of  all  human  cognition,  seems  to  the  cognitive  judgment  of  the 
average  unreflecting  consciousness  an  indisputable  proposition. 
How  they  can  exist  otherwise,  in  respect  of  their  characteris- 
tics and  modes  of  behavior,  than  they  are  known  to  exist,  is 
something  of  which  no  conception  can  easily  be  formed  by 
such  a  consciousness.  This  voice,  with  its  proclamation  that 
things  really  are  and  what  they  are,  seems  to  come,  not  from 
the  depths  of  consciousness  as  the  guaranty  of  an  objectively 
determined  idea,  but  straight  from  the  things  themselves ;  as 
rays  of  sunlight  flow  from  the  sun,  or  rays  of  heat  from  the 


566  IDEALISM  AND  REALISM 

fire.  And  it  is  to  the  things  themselves  —  which  are  never  to 
be  thought  of  as  in  my  consciousness,  but  as  standing  ready- 
made  over  there  —  that  the  confident  appeal  is  taken  in 
case  any  question  arises  concerning  the  truth  of  particular 
cognitions. 

The  physical  and  natural  sciences  fitly  espouse  and  maintain 
this  positive  datum  of  common-sense  realism.  But  for  them 
the  tilings  that  most  really  are,  are  really  not  the  things  that 
are  seen  and  temporal.  The  real  things  are  rather  the  more 
primary  and  elemental  factors  of  things,  and  the  unchanging 
physico-chemical  laws  which  are  supposed  to  control  the  com- 
binations, dissolutions,  and  changing  relations  of  these  factors. 
As  to  the  epistemological  principles  involved  in  this  assump- 
tion, however, "  scientific  realism  "  maintains  the  same  positive 
attitude  toward  external  reality  as  that  which  characterizes 
the  realism  of  the  "  plain  man's  "  consciousness.  At  this  stage 
in  the  philosophy  of  Reality,  the  particular  forms  given  to  the 
construction  of  the  concrete  realities  are  not  the  important  and 
determinative  considerations.  Both  common-sense  realism 
and  scientific  realism  regard  things  as  extra-mentally  existent, 
—  ready-made,  as  it  were,  and  independent,  for  their  existence 
and  their  transactions  between  themselves,  of  all  human  know- 
ing. This  ontological  assumption  alone  it  is  which  warrants 
modern  physical  science  in  drawing,  with  such  lofty  confidence 
and  minuteness  of  details,  the  picture  of  the  evolution  of 
Reality,  when  as  yet  there  was  no  eye  to  see,  no  ear  to  hear, 
no  hand  to  handle,  and  no  human  mind  to  perceive,  conceive, 
or  comprehend.  The  same  assumption  it  is  which  encourages 
the  prediction  as  to  what  will  be,  not  only  next  year  or  next 
century,  as  respects  important  physical  affairs,  and  without 
regarding  the  cognitive  attitude  of  the  whole  race  of  men  (let 
them  perish,  meantime,  of  plague  or  war),  but  when  the  earth 
and  the  sun  shall  be  even  as  the  moon  now  is,  —  burned-out 
coals.  Nor  would  all  the  ideas  and  all  the  deeds  of  will,  of  all 
the  race  of  men,  change  by  a  single  iota  the  statement  of  the 


IDEALISM  AND  REALISM  567 

great  physical  laws  which  sun  and  moon  and  all  the  stars 
unceasingly  obey.  And  we  all,  even  the  most  pronounced  of 
Berkeleian  idealists  or  avowed  solipsistic  sceptics,  listen  with 
reverence  to  this  descriptive  history  and  its  predictions  for  the 
remotest  future.  Even  Schopenhauer  is  compelled  to  prove 
his  proposition  of  the  illusory  character  of  intellectual  concep- 
tion as  to  the  real  nature  of  things  by  referring  to  things  as 
though  they  really  existed  and  actually  behaved  after  the  pat- 
terns set  by  the  conceptions  of  modern  physical  science. 

This  form  of  realism,  when  allowance  is  made  for  its  crudely 
figurative  way  of  speaking,  and  so  long  as  its  positions  are 
affirmative  of  the  positive,  cognitive  attitude  of  men  toward 
Reality  is  incontestably  in  the  right  as  judged  by  a  critical 
epistemology.  It  regards,  indeed,  the  operation  of  cognition 
in  a  way  which  is,  after  all,  not  so  much  intrinsically  erroneous 
as  it  is  one-sided  and  inadequate.  The  apparent  instantaneous- 
ness,  and  the  predominatingly  passive  character,  of  much  of 
our  perception  of  things  by  the  senses  leads  to  an  over-emphasis 
of  one  side  of  the  cognitive  process.  Thus  cognition  comes  to 
be  spoken  of,  and  even  thought  about,  as  though  it  were  merely 
a  copying-off,  or  a  receiving  of  impressions  from,  the  ready- 
made  things.  But  the  most  naive  realism  is  ordinarily  ready 
to  admit  that  this  is  not  precisely  what  its  confidence  guaran- 
tees ;  and  whether  it  makes  the  admission  or  not,  the  admis- 
sion must  be  insisted  upon  in  its  behalf.  Thus  the  most 
uninformed  man  is  brought  to  consider  what  every  scientific 
man  has  already  for  a  long  time  known,  that  cognizing  things 
through  the  senses  is  somehow  a  relative  affair,  and  involves 
other  characteristic  activity  than  that  of  the  extra-mental 
things.  But  what  is  insisted  upon  is  this  :  Things  exist,  not 
simply  while,  or  as,  they  are  known  by  us;  but  all  the  while, 
and  in  independence  of  the  voluntary  or  involuntary  exercise 
of  human  cognitive  faculty.  What  is  also  further  insisted  upon 
is  that  their  characteristic  modes  of  being  and  behavior  belong 
somehow  to  them,  and  are  not  simply  the  resultant  of  the  forms 


568  IDEALISM  AND  REALISM 

of  the  functioning  of  any  man's  mind.  Things  have  their  own 
qualities,  their  own  laws,  their  own  forms  of  life ;  and  they 
have  been,  and  will  be,  in  this  possession,  obeying  these  regu- 
lations, and  enjoying  and  exercising  this  life,  whether  we 
continue  to  think,  and  feel,  and  will,  with  reference  to  them, 
or  not.  It  is  some  such  ontologicai  affirmations  as  these  which 
are  needed  to  satisfy  the  objective  consciousness  of  the  realist, 
rather  than  a  crude  and  easily  disproved  theory  of  knowledge 
which,  whether  with  respect  to  the  secondary  or  to  the  primary 
qualities  of  matter,  considers  the  perception  of  things  as  a 
species  of  photography.  But  the  truth  of  this  realistic  assump- 
tion has  been  provided  for,  and  most  amply  guaranteed,  by 
our  critical  study  of  epistemology.  Even  the  practical  instinct 
which  makes  men  value  things,  only  if  they  may  not  lightly 
regard  them  as  the  mere  creatures  of  their  ideating  activities, 
but  as  somehow  raised  above  men  and  set  where  the  whole 
human  race  cannot  destroy  or  greatly  defame  them,  has  also 
been  satisfied.  Provision  has  even  been  made  by  the  later 
developments  of  epistemological  theory  for  the  sesthetical  and 
the  religious  view  of  the  nature  of  physical  Reality. 

When,  however,  the  realism  either  of  common-sense  or  of 
physical  science  denies  the  existence,  the  efficacy,  or  the  value, 
of  that  which  it  is  pleased  to  consider  unreal,  because  ideal,  it 
meets  with  stern  rebuke  and  inflexible  opposition  from  epis- 
temology. If  it  takes,  as  is  usually  the  case,  a  materialistic 
turn,  it  not  only  runs  great  risk  of  sinking  into  the  slime,  from 
the  ethical  point  of  view,  and  of  dragging  down  the  subject  of 
all  ideas  with  it ;  but  it  also  most  unequivocally  makes  itself 
absurd  in  the  eyes  of  a  critical  student  of  cognition.  For  now 
ready-made  things  have  become  exalted  to  the  place  of  suprem- 
acy ;  they  are  the  alone  indubitably  real ;  by  their  behavior 
they  account  for  all  knowledge  —  not  only  for  its  sensuous  con- 
tent, considered  as  of  varying  intensity,  time-rate,  and  qualita- 
tive complexity,  but  even  for  the  combining  activity  which 
shows  itself  in  the  unity  of  the  content,  for  the  comparing 


IDEALISM  AND  REALISM  569 

activity  which  results  in  the  content  being  teleologically  con- 
structed, and  for  the  metaphysical  faith,  intuition  (or  whatever 
you  please  to  call  it)  which  makes  the  content  known  as  an 
existent  Thing.  Or  to  put  the  case  negatively ;  —  now  the 
existence,  the  effective  agency,  the  ideating  and  relating  signif- 
icance, of  the  subject  of  cognition  is  denied.  The  idea  is  made 
of  no  account  in  the  world  of  reality.  Things  would  not  only 
be,  but  they  would  have  been  all  that  they  now  are,  if  no 
mental  reaction  of  any  kind  had  ever  taken  place.  This  mental 
reaction,  the  idea,  is  itself  naught  but  an  insignificant  and  fleet- 
ing phenomenon,  an  "  e/n-phenomenon."  And  as  its  courage 
grows,  such  one-sided  realism  may  go  on  with  its  negations, 
and  think  to  advance  from  the  conquest  of  the  microcosmos,  in 
the  name  of  ready-made  and  all-creative  things,  to  an  attack 
upon  the  ideal  in  the  macrocosmos.  Then  its  philosophy  affirms 
that  no  potency  or  profit  from  the  Idea  can  be  found  anywhere 
in  the  great  Universe.  Things,  in  the  large,  are  only  what 
physico-chemical  science  knows  them  to  be ;  and  to  speak  of 
ideas  being  "  immanent  in  things  "  is  worse  than  merely  an- 
thropomorphic imaging ;  for  it  is  anthropomorphism  of  a  con- 
fused and  yet  pretentious  character.  The  World  is  a  piece  of 
mechanism ;  the  Ideal  is  but  the  artistic  fancy,  the  unrealiz- 
able dream,  of  hyper-aesthetic  and  over-exquisite  minds. 

But  such  extensions  of  the  negative  positions  of  realistic 
students  of  nature,  or  of  common  minds  that  lack  ethical  and 
aesthetical  impulses  as  well  as  philosophic  insight,  are  forbidden 
by  the  theory  of  knowledge.  For  you  can  never  get  to  things, 
whether  in  the  particular  or  in  the  large,  —  to  that  single  Thing, 
standing  so  silently  over  there,  and  challenging  your  right  to 
deny  its  existence,  or  to  a  World  undergoing  the  most  elabo- 
rate system  of  natural  evolution,  —  except  in  reliance  upon  the 
cogency,  the  validity,  and  the  significance  of  the  idea.  Here  all 
the  positive  considerations  of  subjective  idealism  negative  the 
denials  of  this  form  of  realism.  Particular  things  are  given  to 
me  only  in  and  through  modifications  of  my  consciousness ; 


570  IDEALISM  AND  REALISM 

and  if  the  much  abused  term  "  idea  "  be  employed  for  every 
modification  of  consciousness,  however  complex  and  saturated 
with  feeling  and  voluntary  activity,  then  it  is  incontestable 
truth  that  all  things  are  known  to  me  as  my  ideas.  The  bridge 
which  leads  over  to  the  realm  of  the  extra-mental  Reality  is 
itself  a  mental  affair,  —  some  factor,  or  "  moment,"  or  phase 
of  an  idea.  Even  if  the  chasm  between  mind  and  things  be 
spanned  by  two  kinds  of  structures,  like  the  "  sacred  bridge  " 
and  the  bridge  for  common  people  at  Nikko,  still  mystical 
envisagement  and  matter-of-fact  inference  are  alike  in  being 
phases  of  the  idea. 

Nor  can  the  realist  guarantee  the  existence  and  inherent 
qualities  of  his  ready-made  things,  without  accepting  in  good 
faith  the  work  done  by  his  own  cognitive  faculty ;  and  this 
faculty,  considered  as  a  complex  form  of  functioning,  reaches 
its  supremely  self-confident  architectonic,  as  it  were,  in  the 
construction  and  validating  as  reality  of  the  idea  of  the  Self. 
For  what  I  do  know,  even  if  all  other  knowledge  fail,  is  that 
I  am  actively  and  consciously  striving  for  the  realization  of 
my  own  ideas.  The  one  being,  then,  which  I  most  certainly 
and  unequivocally  know,  is  a  being  whose  very  essence  consists 
in  having,  and  in  acting  under  the  influence  of,  numerous 
immanent  ideas.  Moreover,  our  critical  examination  of  the 
epistemological  problem  has  shown  that,  when  the  object  of 
cognition  is  not  the  Self,  but  is  rather  not-selves  (even  in  the 
form  of  those  things  which  seem  at  first  sight  most  completely 
unlike  the  Self),  cognition  is  possible  only  on  the  general  ad- 
mission that  to  the  so-called  categories  is  given  an  objective 
validity.  But,  primarily,  by  "  categories "  we  mean  simply 
those  forms  of  the  arising,  the  self-relating,  and  the  develop- 
ment of  our  own  ideas,  which  we  believe  to  be  shared  by  all 
men  and  hold  to  belong  to  the  unchanging  constitution  of  the 
mind.  Only,  then,  as  things  get  ideal  construction  have  they 
any  existence  for  man.  Yet  further,  it  has  become  more  and 
more  apparent  as  the  course  of  critical  examination  has  led 


IDEALISM  AND  REALISM  571 

to  the  subtler  and  more  profound  truths  of  the  teleology,  and 
of  the  ethical  and  sesthetical  "  momenta  "  of  knowledge,  that 
the  validating  of  these  categories  for  the  objects  of  ordinary 
and  of  scientific  knowledge  always  implies  that  things  are, 
in  their  connected  real  being  and  systematic  actual  transac- 
tions, analogous  to  the  Self. 

When,  then,  any  form  of  realism,  starting  out  with  the 
assumption  of  the  ready-made  being  of  things,  and  relying 
upon  the  validity  of  human  cognitions  of  things  for  its  justifi- 
cation, denies  the  cogency,  the  objective  validity  and  signifi- 
cance of  ideas  (as  this  word  is  used  by  the  rival  theory  of 
idealism),  it  ends  by  destroying  the  very  foundations  on  which 
it  undertook  to  build  its  theory  of  Reality.  It  has  taken  all 
sense  out  of  its  boasted  common-sense ;  it  has  destroyed  all 
science  in  its  excessive  zeal  for  the  supremacy  of  an  uncritical 
physical  science.  "  A  theory  of  Reality  "  it  cannot  construct ; 
for  to  theorize  about  reality  implies  that  reality  is  more  than 
such  a  form  of  realism  admits.  Theory  of  Reality  implies  that 
Reality  is  itself  in  fact  ideal. 

It  appears  incontrovertible,  then,  that  any  ontological 
theory  which  will  not  consent  speedily  to  undermine  its  own 
foundations  by  assuming  a  palpably  false  epistemological 
theory,  must  accept  and,  if  possible,  harmonize  the  positive 
truths  of  both  Idealism  and  Realism.  It  must  also  reject  the 
errors  into  which  both  fall  when  they  deny  each  other's  rights, 
and  set  themselves  up  for  complete  and  satisfactory  exponents 
of  the  real  being  and  actual  transactions  of  things.  Such  a 
harmonious  theory  of  Reality  involves,  first,  the  admission  of 
the  truth  that  reality  interpenetrates  and  supports  all  our  life 
of  the  ideas,  as  they  succeed  each  other  in  the  flowing  stream 
of  consciousness.  The  subject  of  these  ideas  is  real ;  and  he 
is  a  part  of,  a  living  element  or  moment  in  the  great  life  of 
Reality.  Man's  ideas  are  not  mere  ideas,  —  whenever  they 
become  a  knowledge  of  objects.  This  flux  of  my  ideas  is 
never  to  be  explained  as,  for  indeed  it  never  really  is,  a  sue- 


572  IDEALISM  AND  REALISM 

cession  of  mental  representations  that  may  be  considered 
apart  from  the  real  being  and  actual  transactions  of  things 
that  are  not-my-ideas.  Psychology,  as  treated  by  certain 
psychologists,  may  pretend  that  the  case  is  so ;  it  may 
properly  enough  define  its  own  business  as  that  of  dealing 
with  ideas,  or  "  states  of  consciousness,  as  such."  But  cogni- 
tive states  of  consciousness  are  never  presented  for  examina- 
tion as  mere  states  of  consciousness,  as  simply  the  subject's 
ideas.  They  are  ever  presented  as  though  reality  were 
admitted  into,  were  actually  there,  in  human  consciousness. 
In  all  the  development  of  sense-perception,  including  that  ob- 
scure growth  of  knowledge  which  compels  the  mind  to  differ- 
ence in  a  radical  way  between  the  Self,  as  the  subject  of  ideas, 
and  the  body  considered  even  as  the  remotely  inferred  physico- 
chemical  changes  of  the  brain,  this  admitted  reality  is  satisfied 
only  if  the  claims  of  both  idealism  and  realism  are  admitted. 
I  am  real,  and  things  are  real.  The  relation  established  be- 
tween us  in  knowledge  is  not  the  denial,  but  the  everlastingly 
firm  and  incontestably  true  affirmation,  of  both  realities.  In 
knowing  that  I  am  real,  —  in  realizing  the  idea  that  I  am,  — 
I  am  in  a  most  firm  and  undeniable  connection  with  Reality. 
The  Life  of  the  really  existent  World  flows  into  the  life  of 
my  ideas.  This  is  the  witness  of  my  cognitive  faculty.  This 
is  the  last  criterion  and  the  highest  significance  of  cognition 
itself. 

But  the  reconciliation  of  the  valid  claims  of  both  Idealism 
and  Realism  requires,  second,  the  inclusion  of  the  world 
of  extra-mentally  existent  things  within  the  Idea.  Or, 
rather,  —  to  state  the  same  truth  in  a  less  abstract  way,  — 
that  system  consisting  of  the  real  beings  and  actual  transac- 
tions of  things,  which  common-sense  and  scientific  realism 
regard  as  self-existent,  ready-made,  and  independent  of  all 
ideas,  must  itself  be  conceived  of  in  ideal  terms.  By  a  sub- 
jective idealism,  the  plainest  facts  and  most  obvious  principles 
of  cognition  are  contradicted  ;  it  is  made  impossible  to  justify 


IDEALISM   AND  REALISM  573 

or  even  to  frame  any  consistent  and  tenable  theory  of  Reality. 
Such  an  idealism,  when  once  it  has,  by  its  brilliant  but  shallow 
dialectic,  disposed  of  all  structures  which  afford  any  means 
of  passage  from  the  conscious  idea  to  that  which  exists  extra- 
mentally  and  in  independence  of  the  idea,  attempts  in  vain  for 
itself  an  escape  to  the  other  side.  Poor  bird !  its  wings  are 
self-clipped ;  and  it  can  only  flutter  and  expire  in  the  sight  of 
those  onlookers  whose  very  reality  it  feels  so  sensitively, 
although  it  has  often  enough  reduced  them,  too,  to  its  own 
ideas.  But  if  our  minds  keep  faith  with  the  most  valid 
conclusions  of  a  critical  epistemology,  we  not  only  may,  but 
we  do  and  we  must,  cross  from  the  domain  of  psychology, 
from  the  realm  of  the  mere  idea,  into  the  great  World  of  the 
really  Existent.  But  this  is  done  with  the  knowledge  that  IT, 
too,  is  a  realm  reigned  over  by  ideas.  For  just  as  ideas  of 
things  are  not  mere  ideas,  and  the  scientific  and  philosophic 
conceptions  of  Reality  are  not  mere  products  of  thought  and 
imagination,  so  things  are  not  mere  unideal  things,  and  the 
total  Reality  is  not  a  bare  existence,  but  a  realized  Idea. 

That  some  such  reconciliation  of  Realism  and  Idealism  as 
this  is  demanded  by  a  true  theory  of  knowledge,  there  can  be 
no  doubt.  The  elaboration  and  defence  of  its  details  must 
be  handed  over  by  Epistemology  to  other  appropriate  philo- 
sophical disciplines. 


CHAPTER  XX 

DUALISM  AND   MONISM 

/TM3E  questions  in  debate  between  the  various  forms  of 
-*-  Idealism  and  of  Realism  concern  those  qualifications 
which  shall  be  assigned  to  the  different  classes  of  the  objects 
of  cognition.  The  problem  which  they  discuss  may  be 
stated  as  follows :  How  shall  we  mentally  represent  the 
inner  and  real  nature  of  those  beings  which  to  the  cognitive 
faculty  appear  as  vastly  differentiated  and  separable  into  many 
kinds  ?  The  answer  which  epistemology  suggests  to  meta- 
physics, as  the  only  answer  compatible  with  -the  most  assured 
epistemological  facts,  is  that  all  beings,  both  Selves  and  Things, 
must  be  considered  as  both  real  and  ideal.  In  some  way,  then, 
the  theory  of  reality  must  be  answerable  to  the  theory  of 
knowledge  for  a  reconciliation  of  the  valid  claims  of  conscious 
ideas  and  of  real  things.  But  connected  with  this  meta- 
physical problem  is  another,  which  may  be  described  as  the 
problem  of  the  ultimate  number  of  classes  of  objects  to  which 
the  qualifications  of  reality  shall  be  distributed,  as  it  were. 
Are  all  real  beings  capable  of  being  classed  as  One  Being ; 
or  must  the  ultimate  number  of  really  different  beings  which 
refuse  to  be  classified  together  be  considered  as  two,  or  even 
more  ?  This  inquiry,  too,  of  course,  raises  an  ontological 
problem ;  its  elaborate  and  well  reasoned  solution  belongs  to 
general  philosophy,  to  the  philosophy  of  Nature  and  of  Mind, 
and  perhaps  especially  to  the  philosophy  of  religion.  But 
epistemology  offers  certain  suggestions  looking  toward  its 
better  understanding  and  more  satisfactory  treatment.  The 
conclusions  which  we  have  taken  such  pains  to  reach  cannot 


DUALISM   AND  MONISM  575 

be  indifferent  upon  all  the  subjects  debated  between  the 
different  forms  of  Dualism  and  Monism.  Indeed,  only  such 
a  theory  of  reality  as  shall  reconcile  the  valid  claims  of 
both  sides  to  this  contest  comports  with  a  sound  theory  of 
knowledge. 

There  are  two  sets  of  terms,  however,  which  are,  almost  of 
necessity,  so  ambiguously  used  in  the  customary  discussions 
of  Dualism  and  Monism,  that  without  coming  to  some  sort 
of  preliminary  reckoning  with  these  terms,  all  treatment  of 
this  subject  is  mere  logomachy.  One  of  these  comprises 
certain  terms  of  number ;  the  other  comprises  certain  terms 
of  relation.  In  general,  terms  of  number  and  terms  of  rela- 
tion, above  all  other  terms,  lend  themselves  to  ambiguity 
when  the  subjects  to  which  they  are  applied  are  complex  and 
capable  of  a  living  development.  To  illustrate  from  a  classic 
dispute  in  a  field  where  one  form  of  the  conflict  between  the 
two  rival  theories  we  are  about  to  examine  takes  place  :  All 
are  agreed  that,  in  some  meaning  of  the  word,  the  soul  of 
every  man  is  a  unity.  "  I  am  one,  and  you  are  another,"  is  a 
declaration  so  indisputable  that  it  cannot  be  questioned  with- 
out admitting  it.  "  I  am  I,"  and  "  thou  art  thou,"  -  —  it  is 
upon  a  common  admission  of  the  validity  of  such  declarations 
that  all  intercourse,  even  the  fiercest  battle  over  the  meaning 
of  so-called  "  double  consciousness,"  is  based.  But  in  what 
sense  am  I  "one,"  and  you  "  another,"  and  both  of  us,  con- 
sidered together,  to  be  called  two,  or  perchance  one,  as  the 
case  may  be  ?  The  answer  to  this  question  should  carry  with 
it  a  final  adjustment  of  the  disputed  use  of  certain  terms  of 
number.  Kant's  well-known  refutation  of  the  "  transcen- 
dental parallogism"  was  valid  against  such  a  unity  of  the 
soul  as  certain  theologians,  in  their  desire  to  demonstrate  for 
it  a  non posse  mori,  had  attributed  to  it.  But  in  denying  that 
the  soul  is  self-known  as  a  real  unity,  Kant  himself  was  as 
fanciful  and  far  away  from  the  truth  of  the  facts  as  were  the 
theologians  he  confuted. 


576  DUALISM  AND  MONISM 

Thus,  too,  even  in  speaking  of  the  body  as  one,  whether  we 
contrast  the  body  and  the  soul  as  making  two  in  number,  or 
fuse  both  into  some  form  of  a  unity  that  includes  both  but 
really  is  neither,  our  psycho-physical  mathematics  certainly 
stands  in  great  need  of  careful  criticism.  Two  beings  are 
not  constituted  a  real  unity,  in  any  use  of  the  numerical  idea 
which  is  fitly  applicable,  simply  by  calling  them " one"  in  some 
other  quite  different  meaning  for  the  same  word.  Nor  are  two 
beings,  which  are  actually  bound  together  into  a  unity  of  living 
connection  —  a  ceaseless  action  and  interaction  —  made  really 
to  be  "  two "  disconnected  beings  by  pointing  out  that  they 
are,  in  another  meaning  of  the  same  words,  two  rather  than 
one.  In  what  sense  "  one,"  or  "  two,"  or  "  many  "  ?  this  is 
certainly  a  question  which  can  never  properly  be  lost  entirely 
out  of  sight  in  discussing  the  claims  of  dualism  and  monism. 
The  same  thinker  may  well  enough  be  both  a  dualist  and  a 
monist  in  his  theoretical  views  of  body  and  soul,  of  matter 
and  spirit,  of  things  and  Self,  of  finite  and  Absolute,  accord- 
ing as  he  allows  himself  to  shift  his  conceptions  under  these 
terms  of  number.  For  the  body  itself  is  really  one  ;  or  it  is 
really  a  considerable  number,  an  infinite  host,  according  to 
one's  point  of  view.  It  is  one  with  the  mind,  or  just  as 
clearly  another  than  the  mind,  so  that  the  two  are  quite  dis- 
tinct realities,  according  to  one's  meaning  for  the  term 
"unity."  All  unities  and  all  dualities  are  alike  mysterious 
and,  ultimately  considered,  inexplicable,  if  only  one  chooses 
to  look  at  them  in  that  way.  I  am  one,  or  twofold,  or  mani- 
fold in  my  being,  whether  considered  as  a  Self  or  as  a  soul. 
My  body,  too,  is  one,  or  manifold,  or  only  a  most  inconstant 
flux,  a  mere  temporary  and  ever  shifting  channel  for  a  small 
part  of  the  stream  of  Nature  to  flow  through,  if  in  any  one  of 
several  different  but  equally  true  ways  it  pleases  the  observer 
to  regard  it. 

Certain  ambiguities  in  the  use  of  terms  of  relation  also 
attach  themselves  to  those  conceptions  which  are  customarily 


DUALISM  AND  MOXISM  577 

insisted  upon  by  the  dualistic  and  monistic  theories  of  Real- 
ity. These  ambiguities  are  not  easily  separated  from  the 
foregoing;  indeed,  both  classes  of  misconceptions  originate 
and  develop  in  the  same  soil.  It  is  only  as  they  fall  also 
under  the  category  of  relation  that  terms  of  number  can  be 
applied  to  any  being  or  to  any  class  of  existences.  In  the 
case  of  the  highest,  most  well-certified  and  yet  complex  of 
unities,  —  namely,  the  Self  as  the  object  of  self-consciousness 
and  of  recognitive  memory,  —  the  unity  attributed  to  it  de- 
pends upon  the  character  of  the  relations  under  which  it  is 
proposed  to  bring  a  variety  of  phenomena.  All  the  different 
psychic  activities  and  states  may  be  theoretically  brought 
together  and  attached  to  the  conception  of  one  Self,  because 
they  are  all  known  and  remembered  as  related  to  each  other 
in  the  stream  of  consciousness,  and  are  assignable  (which 
implies  a  form  of  relation)  to  a  single  subject  of  them  all. 
But  two  classes  of  relations,  and  the  words  we  are  compelled 
to  use  in  order  to  express  them,  are  especially  liable  to  am- 
biguity. These  are  the  relations  which  are  conceived  of 
under  terms  either  of  dependence  in  being  or  of  interdepend- 
ent action.  How  much,  and  what  kind  of  dependence  of  one 
being  upon  other  beings  is  consistent  with  a  valid  claim  to  be 
itself  considered  as  a  unity  of  independent  being  ?  On  the  con- 
trary, what  amount  of  reciprocal  determination  between  two 
apparently  separate  beings  wan-ants  us  in  proclaiming  that 
the  apparent  twofold  nature  of  their  being  is  to  be  resolved 
into  a  more  fundamental  oneness  of  being?  There  are  no 
a  priori  means  for  the  solution  of  such  problems ;  and, 
indeed,  any  solution  which  may  be  offered  for  the  concrete 
cases  in  which  such  problems  present  themselves,  depends 
for  its  validity,  and  even  for  its  intelligibility,  very  much 
upon  the  use  which  the  proposed  solution  makes  of  the 
above-mentioned  terms. 

If  a  total  independence  of  all  other  existences  were  neces- 
sary for  any  being,  in  order  that  it  might  claim  the  individu- 

37 


578  DUALISM  AND  MONISM 

ality  and  the  unity  which  the  word  "  one  "  implies,  then  no 
particular  existences  could  ever  satisfy  sucli  a  claim  ;  then 
no  particular  existences  could  really  exist  as  separate  unities, 
in  any  sense  of  the  words.  Then  all  Being  would  be  One ; 
the  many  would  not  be ;  and  the  complete  simplicity  and 
complete  uselessness  of  the  Eleatic  view  of  Reality  would 
justify  itself.  Yet  how  often  do  we  hear  of  demands  virtually 
made  upon  the  human  soul  that  it  shall  show  its  independ- 
ency of  matter  in  general,  of  brain-states  in  particular,  or 
even  of  its  own  constitution  and  laws  of  development,  if  it 
would  lay  valid  claim  to  be  called  "  one  "  and  "  real  "  in  its 
being.  If,  on  the  other  hand,  the  lack  of  any  particular 
kind  of  connection,  or  method  of  action  between  two  beings 
is  a  sufficient  warrant  for  considering  them  as  wholly  dis- 
connected entities,  then  the  question  arises :  How  shall  the 
Unity  of  one  World  be  brought  about  by  the  mere  presence  in 
existence  of  a  vast  multitude  of  such  disconnected  entities  ? 
Once  more,  if  the  belief  or  the  knowledge  of  men,  that  all  the 
separate  and  independent  beings  of  the  Universe,  both  minds 
and  things,  are  bound  together  into  an  ideal  Unity,  is  to  be  the 
warrant  for  denying  the  reality  of  the  fundamental  differen- 
tiations in  which  human  cognitive  experience  takes  its  rise, 
how  shall  any  diversity  be  left,  out  of  which  to  construct  this 
ideal  Unity  ?  The  detailed  answer  to  these  and  similar  in- 
quiries is  an  elaborate  system  of  metaphysics.  But  the 
answers  already  won  for  the  related  questions  in  epistemol- 
ogy  furnish  a  light  which  is  both  a  guide  and  a  warning. 
They  guide  the  mind  in  a  strictly  critical  path  for  the  deter- 
mination of  the  rights  of  both  dualism  and  monism,  in  their 
use  of  terms  of  number  and  of  terms  of  relation,  as  applied  to 
real  beings ;  and  they  warn  the  mind  against  being  deceived 
by  the  sophisms  concealed  in  these  terms,  especially  in  the 
form  of  assumptions  and  points  of  view  contradictory  of  the 
facts  and  principles  of  cognition. 

The  positive  claims  from  which  both  the  dualistic  and  the 


DUALISM  AND  MONISM  579 

monistic  theories  of  Reality  take  their  rise  accord  with  the 
plainest  facts  arid  most  obvious  principles  of  cognition.     Dual- 
ism begins  in  the  recognized  differentiation,  the   cognized 
opposition  of  Self  and  Things.    As  has  already  been  pointed 
out,  the  one  indispensable  form  of  duality,  so  to  speak,  is  an 
actualized  distinction  without  which  even  the  conception  of 
knowledge  is  impossible ;  it  is  the  distinction  between  sub- 
ject and  object.     But  this  distinction  is  emphasized  and  set, 
with  especial  firmness  and  irresistible  strength,  into  experi- 
ence, when  the  object  of  cognition  is  some  thing.    There,  set 
over  against  me,  and  by  no  possible  action  of  my  will,  or  stress 
of  my  desire,  or  aberration  of  my  intellect,  is  that  which  is  not- 
me.     This  often  repeated  experience  of  that  which  is  other 
than  the  being  I  am,  and  yet,  since  it  is  my  object,  capable  of 
being  reckoned  in  relation  with  me,  makes  an  indestructible 
dualism  of  the  sum-total  of  experience.     I  am  one,  and  it  is 
one ;  I  and  it  are  two,  and  not  one.    For  although  it  is,  as 
object,  in  my  consciousness,  it  is  there  on  such  terms  as  pre- 
vent its  fusing  with  my  Self,  through  the  process  of  cogni- 
tion, into  a  unity.     However  like  myself  it  may  be  conceived 
of  as  being,  and  however  intimate  and  constant  the  connec- 
tion between  us,  still  It  and  /  are  two  separate  and  inde- 
pendent beings.     We  are  separate  and  independent,  because 
the  very  terms  of  our  acquaintanceship,  so  to  speak,  are  such 
as  to  show  that  we  actually  can  separate,  and  yet  each  retain 
its  own  existence.     I  continue  to  live  as  a  Self,  after  this 
particular  thing  ceases  to  be  my  object.     It  continues  to  be 
a  thing,  after  I  have  withdrawn  from  it  my  cognitive  activity. 
Nor  is  the  case  altered,  so  far  as  the  essentials  are  con- 
cerned, when  the  particular  thing  which   is   perceived,   or 
imagined,  or  thought,  is  one's   own  body,  —  whether  as   a 
totality,   or  as  some  particular  portion  or  special  series  of 
bodily  functions.     My  body  is  mine,  to  be  sure  ;  and  thus  it 
is  a  thing  in  which  I  am  particularly  interested,  and  with 
which  I  have  a  more  intimate  acquaintance,  in  some  respects 


580  DUALISM  AND  MONISM 

at  least,  than  with  other  things.  As  to  a  theoretical  or  actual 
dependence  upon  its  structure  and  functions  for  the  life  of 
cognition,  we  are  not  at  this  moment  concerned  to  inquire. 
But  when  I  make  any  external  part  of  this  body  an  object  of 
sense-perception,  or  when  any  internal  part  forces  itself  as 
an  object  upon  my  most  acute  attention,  it  appears  to  me 
upon  the  same  terms  as  those  upon  which  other  things 
appear.  It  is  a  separable  and  independent  being ;  it,  too,  is 
seen  as  colored  extension,  heard  as  resounding,  felt  as  hard 
or  smooth,  cool  or  warm,  as  something  other  than  me ;  and 
so,  as  making  with  me  a  sort  of  pair,  or  duality ;  I  and  my 
body  are  two  instead  of  simply  one.  Even  more  obviously 
true  are  the  facts  to  which  the  dualistic  view  of  reality 
appeals  when  it  acquires  that  form  of  science  and  specialized 
erudition  which  modern  histology  and  physiology  have  im- 
parted to  it.  My  brain  and  I,  who  think  and  argue  about 
this  brain  and  its  relations  to  consciousness,  are  during  all 
this  process,  with  its  termination  in  an  alleged  judgment  of 
cognition,  two  quite  separable  and  distinct  beings,  /imagine 
it ;  I  think  about  it ;  I  draw  conclusions  which  affirm  either 
a  monistic  theory,  or  a  theory  of  psycho-physical  parallelism, 
or  some  other  theory  respecting  its  relations  to  me,  —  only 
as  we  are  considered  to  be  two  rather  than  one. 

Moreover,  the  more  refined  and  well  certified  the  science  of 
the  constitution  and  functions  of  the  body  of  man  becomes, 
the  more  definitively  is  it  classified  with  those  not-selves  which 
are  things,  and  which  together  with  the  cognizing  Self  make 
a  dual  world,  rather  than  a  world  that  has  only  beings  capable 
of  being  identified  as  belonging  to  one  class.  This  object  of 
our  modern  "  cerebral  science,"  so-called,  must  be  imagined  as 
(and  wherever  it  is  perceived,  is  actually  known  to  be)  some- 
what spread  out  in  space,  —  weight  so  much,  colored  so,  with 
separable  gross  masses  arranged  in  such  an  order.  Put  under 
the  microscope,  it  is  further  known  in  precisely  the  same  terms 
as  those  which  characterize  the  tissue  of  a  plant,  or  of  some 


DUALISM   AND  MONISM  581 

one  of  the  animals  which  is  farthest  removed  from  correla- 
tion or  correspondence  with  the  self-conscious  Self.  Analyzed 
in  the  laboratory,  it  is  so  much  water,  so  much  of  phospho- 
rized  fats,  etc.  And  if  its  behavior  could  be  inspected  when  it 
is  most  intimately  and  influentially  related  to  human  cognitive 
activity,  this  behavior,  and  the  being  that  thus  behaves,  would 
doubtless  have  to  be  classified  with  amreboid  bodies  in  general 
rather  than  with  the  self-conscious  Self.  Now,  science  cannot 
overcome  or  diminish  this  dualism.  It  is  there,  in  the  really 
existent,  and  unconquerably  persistent.  The  chemico-physical 
investigation  of  cerebral  substance,  or  of  living  bodies  gen- 
erally, widens  and  deepens  instead  of  narrowing  or  filling  in 
the  gap  between  the  self-conscious  knower  and  any  portion  of 
the  world  of  not-self.  And  psycho-physical  investigation, 
whether  it  puts  us  into  possession  of  any  new  truth  or  only 
renders  the  more  definite  certain  quantitative  and  quali- 
tative relations  already  recognized,  has  no  other  effect  upon 
this  natural  dualism.  Its  very  field  of  investigation  can  be 
defined  and  explored  only  upon  the  assumption  that  the  more 
or  less  uniform  relations  of  two  beings  are  the  subject  of 
investigation.  The  moment  that  the  Ego's  conscious  life  of 
cognition  is  identified  with  the  chemico-physical  changes  in  the 
cerebral  substance,  the  whole  field  of  psycho-physics  is  with- 
drawn from  the  view  of  the  scientific  mind. 

Still  further,  what  is  true  in  the  microcosm,  man,  is  also 
true  in  the  macrocosm,  the  Universe  at  large.  For  every 
human  Self,  this  duality  is  a  necessary  fact  of  experience,  a 
permanent  and  fundamental  truth  to  which  the  actual  state 
of  the  case,  as  it  were,  must  always  correspond.  The  most 
definite  and  indisputable  thing  which  I  know  about  the  world 
of  the  non-self  is  this :  There  are  other  selves  existing  on 
terms  with  themselves  and  with  the  total  World  of  real  beings 
and  actual  transactions,  similar  to  those  terms  on  which  I 
know  myself  to  exist.  It  is  of  the  very  nature  of  selfhood  that 
this  duality  should  persist.  Each  one  of  these  other  selves,  of 


582  DUALISM  AND  MONISM 

my  so-called  "  fellow  men,"  is  inevitably  a  consistent  dualist,  in 
practice  and  in  theory.  For  each  one  there  is  existent,  on  the 
one  hand,  the  Self  that  knows  and  feels  itself  and  plans  for 
itself,  and  the  world  of  other  beings  that  are  not-self,  both 
minds  and  things.  This  must  always  be  so,  as  long  as  self- 
conscious  selves  form  any  part  of  the  sum-total  of  existence. 
This  distinction,  as  valid  in  reality,  no  religious  or  other  mys- 
tical experience,  and  no  philosophic  or  otherwise  esoteric 
doctrine,  can  at  all  invalidate.  The  attempt,  even  in  thought, 
to  annihilate  this  dualism  of  being  which  belongs  to  the  essence 
of  selfhood,  can  succeed  only  if  all  differentiation  of  selves 
be  itself  destroyed.  Absorption  of  the  many  selves  into  the 
One  Self,  into  the  Absolute,  is  conceivable  only  in  a  negative 
way.  It  is  the  mere,  the  otherwise  undefinable  negation  of 
my  being,  and  of  all  other  beings  now  known  as  my  fellow 
selves.  It  is  also  the  negation  of  all  things,  as  they  are  now 
known  to  them  and  to  me ;  since,  both  for  them  and  for  me, 
knowledge  of  things  is  only  conceivable  as  a  commerce  in 
which  selves  take  part,  as  dependent  upon  their  relations  to 
that  larger  and  other  Self. 

It  is,  however,  when  dualism  begins  its  denials  that  the 
corrective  facts  and  truths  of  a  monistic  view  of  man  and  of 
the  world  must  be  invoked  against  it.  As  a  rule,  these 
denials  make  use  of  terms  of  number  and  terms  of  relation 
in  a  misleading  or  defective  manner.  Thus  in  guarding 
against  a  too  hasty  or  too  strict  unification  of  seemingly 
diverse  phenomena,  in  one  meaning  of  the  words,  the  dualistic 
hypothesis  may  deny  all  possibility  of  any  kind  of  unification. 
It  may  thus  destroy  the  unity,  in  reality,  of  man  and  of  the 
world  in  which  man's  place  is  set.  The  motif  for  such  an 
extreme  of  dualism  may  arise  in  any  one  of  several  ways. 
But  it  is  not  the  task  of  epistemology  to  give  to  the  dualistic 
hypothesis  a  thorough  critical  handling.  In  certain  of  its 
several  windings,  however,  the  theory  of  knowledge  easily 
follows,  overtakes,  and  confutes  it.  This  is  especially  true  of 


DUALISM  AND  MONISM  583 

that  form  of  dualism  which  makes  of  body  and  mind  two 
unrelated  kinds  of  beings  (to  use  the  Kantian  phrase,  when 
considered  as  phenomena  realitatis}  by  first  breaking  off  all 
actual  connection  between  the  two  main  classes  of  psychoses. 
We  refer  again,  of  course,  to  the  theory  of  psycho-physical 
parallelism,  when  it  has  taken  the  form  of  a  consistent  and 
thoroughgoing  ontology.  This  is  the  favorite  modern  form 
of  an  exhausted  and  barren  mediaeval  metaphysics  arrayed  in 
meretricious  garb  so  as  the  better  to  coquette  with  science. 
This  theory  makes  such  a  duality  of  body  and  mind  that 
neither  can  influence,  determine,  or  causally  affect  the  other. 
The  old-fashioned  theological  way  of  putting  the  case  was 
this :  body  and  mind  cannot  act  on  each  other,  for  they  are 
separated  by  "  the  whole  diameter  of  being."  It  had  a  claim 
to  respectability,  for  it  designed  to  further  the  interests  of  the 
human  soul.  Such  a  claim  to  respectability  is  quite  lacking 
to  the  present  doctrine  of  psycho-physical  parallelism ;  and  a 
critical  examination  of  the  nature,  origin,  and  growth  of 
knowledge  has  shown  that  such  a  separation  of  the  nature  of 
man  cannot  be  maintained. 

Experience  is  without  doubt  one,  —  some  kind  of  a  unity. 
It  is,  also,  without  doubt,  such  a  kind  of  unity  as  requires 
the  combined  action  of  Self  and  of  Things.  But  all  other 
things  influence,  act  upon,  or  causally  affect  (one  may  choose 
what  terms  one  pleases  to  express  the  truth  of  the  actual 
relation)  the  Self,  so  far  as  experience  and  empirical  science 
can  safely  go,  only  as  they  influence,  act  upon,  or  causally 
affect  the  body.  That  the  human  body  is  bound  into  the 
world  of  physical  beings  and  events,  and  so  constitutes,  in 
some  valid  meaning  of  the  words,  a  part  of  this  unity  of  the 
World,  cannot  be  denied  without  denying  all  possibility  of 
knowing  what  the  body  is,  —  and,  indeed,  all  possibility  of 
thinking  or  talking  about  it  as  "  body."  This  particular  or- 
ganism exists  only  as  a  part  of  the  sum-total  of  things,  as  one 
among  many  other  organic  and  inorganic  beings,  in  the  Unity 


584  DUALISM  AND  MONISM 

of  the  one  World.  It  is,  then,  only  through  the  body,  so  far  as 
any  science  of  relations  to  the  complex  system  of  things  can  be 
framed  or  even  conceived  of,  that  I,  as  a  conscious  and  cogni- 
tive soul,  am  united  with  the  world.  Mystical  and  occult  forms 
of  connection  established  between  Reality  and  my  Self,  there 
may  be ;  at  present  we  are  not  concerned  to  affirm  or  to  deny 
the  possibility  of  this.  But  there  is  no  science  of  the  relations 
which  the  Ego  can  sustain,  as  a  cognizing  subject,  to  the  real 
being  and  actual  transactions  of  things,  that  does  not  validate 
itself,  in  the  last  resort,  by  an  appeal  to  the  changes  produced 
by  these  things  within  the  human  physical  organism.  Tele- 
pathy, spiritualism  (in  the  more  vulgar  meaning  of  the 
word),  occult  religions,  and  other  forms  of  alleged  communi- 
cation, may  be  allowed  whatever  rights  they  can  make  good ; 
but  both  in  the  work-a-day  life  and  in  all  the  established 
science  of  man,  it  is  through  his  physical  organism  that  his 
conscious  Ego  is  related  to  the  world  of  physical  beings  and 
physical  events. 

Now  it  follows,  most  incontestably,  as  it  seems  to  us,  that 
to  deny  a  further  and  essential  unification  of  body  and  mind, 
as  a  system  of  interacting  beings,  is  completely  to  cut  the 
mind  off  from  the  world  of  things.  It  is  to  convert  the 
psychic  existence  and  psychic  development  of  man  into  an 
unreal  and  ghostly  affair.  Here  am  I,  in  the  unity  of  my  one 
experience,  seemingly  aware,  with  great  intensity  and  perfect 
clearness  of  conviction,  of  my  own  dual  existence.  I,  indeed, 
never  completely  identify  my  Self  with  my  body  or  with  any 
part  of  it ;  much  less  do  I  fail  to  regard  the  remainder  of  the 
world  of  things  as  having  another  being  than  myself.  But 
that  I  am  in  actual  living  relations  with  this  body,  determining 
not  only  its  grosser  movements  but  its  more  refined  and  subtle 
changes,  in  dependence  upon  my  ideas,  feelings,  and  volitions ; 
that  I  am  constantly  being  determined  in  these  ideas,  feel- 
ings, and  volitions  by  its  grosser  movements  and  more  subtle 
changes ;  and  that  I  am  thus  united  with  it  into  the  oneness 


DUALISM  AND  MONISM  585 

of  complete  human  being,  and  through  it,  am  connected  with 
the  Unity  of  the  World  of  things,  —  of  all  this  neither  com- 
mon-sense nor  science  seems  to  leave  us  in  doubt.  For  the 
development  of  cognitive  experience  itself  is  bound  up  with 
such  assumptions ;  and  the  truth  of  the  same  assumptions  is, 
in  turn,  illustrated  and  made  valid  by  the  content  of  cognition 
in  all  the  development  of  experience.  To  deny  such  a  unity 
of  body  and  mind,  and  of  the  mind  with  the  world  of  things 
through  the  body,  by  invalidating  the  reality  of  the  connec- 
tions which  experience  establishes  between  the  two,  is  virtu- 
ally to  deny  the  possibility  of  all  knowledge  of  the  body  and 
of  all  other  things.  What  strange  bed-fellows  does  this 
meaningless  denial  bring  together  here !  For  a  theory  of 
psycho-physical  parallelism  which  has  been  conceived  and 
bred  in  the  interests  of  a  science  of  physical  things,  and 
which  is  exquisitety  sensitive  toward  physical  and  biological 
formulas,  has  fallen  into  the  embrace  of  a  sceptical  and 
agnostic  idealism. 

This  modern  extreme  of  dualism,  however,  when  applied 
to  the  larger  World  of  Reality,  shows  plain  signs  of  a  ten- 
dency to  lapse  into  the  positions  of  the  most  old-fashioned 
theological  Manichseism.  The  world  of  things  that  are  not 
human,  the  system  of  animals  and  plants  that  are  graded  by 
natural  science  as  below  man,  is,  nevertheless,  so  full  of  the 
tokens  of  mind  that  the  theory  of  psycho-physical  parallelism 
cannot  consistently  limit  itself  to  the  dual  phenomena  of  hu- 
man life.  Even  non-living  things  are  not  wanting  in  similar 
tokens  of  the  mind  that  is  in  them.  The  theory,  when  applied 
beyond  the  limits  of  man's  dual  nature,  must,  therefore,  resort 
to  a  universal "  mind-stuff"  which  runs  its  career  as  a  system 
(sz'c)  or  an  incoherent  jumble  of  psychic  "  momenta,"  parallel 
with  those  suggestive  movements  in  space  which  all  things 
are  wont  to  undergo.  Between  these  two,  the  matter  and  the 
"  mind-stuff,"  no  commerce  or  actual  connection  can  be  allowed. 
Neither  is  it  allowable —  at  least  as  some  of  the  advocates  of 


586  DUALISM  AND  MONISM 

this  form  of  dualism  are  ready  to  maintain  —  that  we  should 
unite  all  the  psychic  "  momenta  "  by  theoretically  connecting 
them  with  some  one  subject,  a  so-called  Infinite  Mind.  It  is 
thus  assumed  that  the  human  imagination  can  compass,  in  a 
way  to  guarantee  its  possible  reality,  the  conception  of  an 
everywhere  present  but  disparate  "  Mind-stuff,"  or  a  diffuse 
and  impersonal  Spirit ;  but  it  cannot  be  trusted  to  construct 
the  consistent  idea  of  an  Absolute  Personal  Self.  But  it  is 
chiefly  the  business  of  the  philosophy  of  religion,  or  of  a  sys- 
tem of  general  metaphysics,  to  inquire  into  the  mythology  of 
the  "mind-stuff"  theory  of  the  world,  —  a  shamefaced  way 
of  providing  for  gods  many  and  lords  many,  without  courage 
to  invoke  the  Spirit  of  One  Living  God.  "We  are  satisfied 
now  with  maintaining  that  such  a  form  of  dualism  gets  its 
rebuke  from  a  critical  doctrine  of  the  nature,  origin,  and  va- 
lidity of  knowledge.  To  admit  an  infinite  number  of  psy- 
chic centres,  each  of  which  is  really  cut  off  from  connection 
with  the  being  and  the  transactions  of  the  system  of  things, 
is  to  destroy  the  unity  of  the  real  World,  both  as  it  is  known 
to  us  and  as  it  is  existent  in  independence  of  our  knowledge. 
In  opposition  to  such  a  dualism,  almost  any  monistic  theory 
which  makes  a  fair  show  of  comprehending  all  the  phenomena 
as  an  interconnected  system  will  always  have  a  decided  ad- 
vantage. And  this  advantage  does  not  grow  simply  out  of 
the  tendency  of  reason  to  unify  and  ground  all  experience  in 
as  few  principles  as  possible ;  it  grows  also  out  of  the  fact  that 
the  form  of  dualism  which  it  opposes  has  so  little  standing 
with  the  phenomena  of  cognition. 

It  is  not  necessary  for  our  present  purpose  to  follow  the 
course  of  the  monistic  theory  of  mind  and  things  through  the 
details  of  its  positive  or  negative  conclusions.  What  could  be 
said  both  in  defence  and  in  criticism  has,  perhaps,  already  been 
sufficiently  indicated.  In  its  attempt  to  maintain  the  incom- 
parable unity  in  reality  of  the  self-conscious  human  Soul,  it 
has  on  its  side  all  those  practical  and  theoretical  considera- 


DUALISM  AND  MONISM  587 

tions  which  are  most  potent  to  assist  such  an  attempt.  The 
very  nature  of  knowledge  is  an  impregnable  fortress  for 
a  monistic  doctrine  of  the  human  Self.  But  this  Self  is  fur- 
ther known  as  bound  into  a  more  complex  and  looser  sort 
of  unity  with  the  body,  by  a  system  of  complicated  interac- 
tions; and  through  this  system  it  is  bound  into  the  larger 
unity  of  the  total  World  of  things  and  of  other  selves.  But 
on  the  other  hand,  as  soon  as  the  monistic  view  leads  to  the 
denial  of  those  certified  facts,  and  those  valid  inferences  from 
the  facts,  which  the  return  to  the  dualistic  point  of  view  always 
brings  to  mind,  it  makes  this  denial  at  the  expense  of  its  own 
support  from  a  tenable  theory  of  knowledge.  The  solipsism 
which  identifies  all  reality  with  the  Ego's  states,  effects  this 
denial  in  one  way ;  the  materialism  which  will  hear  only  of 
one  reality,  and  that  the  reality  of  things,  takes  another 
course.  But  the  cognition  of  man  persistently  affirms  the 
reality  both  of  the  Self  and  of  Things.  And  finally,  every 
monistic  theory  of  Reality  which  so  identifies  all  different 
beings  as  to  destroy  the  actuality  of  the  differentiations 
which  cognition  validates,  is  thereby  self-confuted.  The 
many  existences  of  the  world  of  our  experience  are  not  so  one 
as  to  lose  all  individuality,  or  as  to  annul  the  reality  and  the 
worth  of  that  system  of  relations  in  which  human  cognition 
finds  them,  and  which  it  is  the  business  of  human  cognitive 
faculty  to  discover,  to  recognize,  and  to  proclaim. 

Here  again,  then,  the  Philosophy  of  Knowledge  demands 
that  it  shall  itself  be  supplemented  by  some  Theory  of  Reality 
which  will  admit  and  harmonize  the  valid  claims  of  both  Dual- 
ism and  Monism.  We  do  not  believe  that  to  meet  this  de- 
mand is  a  hopeless,  or  even  an  overwhelmingly  difficult  task. 
On  the  contrary,  the  indices  that  point  the  directions  in 
which  the  search  should  go  have  been  appearing  from  time 
to  time,  during  the  course  of  our  epistemological  investigation. 
No  good  reason  can  be  given  why  so-called  "  common-sense," 
and  science  as  conducted  from  both  the  physical  and  the  psy- 


588  DUALISM   AND   MONISM 

chical  points  of  view,  and  the  last  word  of  philosophy  as  in- 
volving an  attempt  at  that  final  synthesis  of  the  reflective 
powers  which  interprets  the  inner  meaning  of  things,  should 
not  all  be  in  substantial  accord  upon  this  great  subject.  The 
cosmic  mathematics  of  the  unreflecting,  of  the  scientific,  and 
of  the  philosophical  mind,  although  somewhat  figurative  in 
its  expressions,  need  not  be  full  of  internal  contradictions. 
Terms  of  number  —  one,  two,  or  more  —  even  when  applied 
to  abstract  principles,  to  complex  ideas,  or  to  systems  of  be- 
lief and  of  impressions  that  are  subject  to  ethical  and  sestheti- 
cal  prejudices,  ought  not  to  be  absolutely  unintelligible  or 
afflicted  with  inherent  contradictions. 

Suppose,  then,  that  we  take  our  start  on  fair  terms  of  un- 
derstanding with  the  plain  man's  consciousness.  He  has  no 
doubt  that  he,  as  a  conscious  subject  of  states,  is  "  one "  in  a 
sense  of  that  word  which  cannot  be  made  to  gather  and  bind 
up  with  these  states  any  others,  into  a  unity  of  the  same 
being.  In  this  sense  of  the  word,  he  cannot  be  made  to  be- 
lieve that  any  thing,  not  even  that  physical  organization  with 
which  his  consciousness  is  most  intimately  connected,  is  a 
part  of  the  same  unity.  But  he  has  scarcely  less  doubt  that 
this  duality,  which  exists  between  himself  as  conscious  sub- 
ject of  states  and  his  own  body,  is  not  inconsistent  with,  but 
is  rather  explicable  only  in  terms  of  another  kind  of  unity. 
This  new  unity,  which  embraces  the  duality  of  mind  and 
body,  is  that  which  makes  him  to  be  "  one  man."  Its  essen- 
tial characteristic,  the  deprivation  of  which  would  reduce  this 
unity  from  a  highly  significant  reality  to  a  fictitious  and  de- 
lusive dream,  is  the  actuality  of  the  causal  relation  between 
body  and  mind.  Accepting  this  relation  as  valid  in  reality 
he  finds  himself,  as  one  man,  however  separate  in  this  unity 
of  his  manhood,  still  bound  into  a  social  and  a  comprehensive 
psycho-physical  unity  with  the  world  of  his  environment. 
It  is  this,  to  him,  more  indefinite  and  yet  all  inclusive  unity 
in  which  he  has  life,  and  motion,  and  being  ;  for  he  is,  at  the 


DUALISM   AND  MONISM  589 

same  time,  always  a  child  of  nature  and  a  child  of  human 
society.  By  all  his  practical  activities,  as  he  accepts  the 
dominion  of  nature  and  yet  reacts  in  order  to  subjugate  to 
his  uses  her  materials  and  her  forces,  he  makes  acknowledg- 
ment of  the  reality  of  this  all-comprehensive  Unity.  In  the 
higher  exercises  of  the  ideal  life,  in  ethics  and  in  art,  and  in 
religion,  he  expresses  a  similar  confidence.  He  is  always 
thinking  of  himself  as  one  Self,  with  a  body  making  one  man, 
set  over  against  the  rest  of  the  world  of  selves  and  of  things 
in  this  unchanging  duality ;  and  yet  he  knows  he  is  a  part 
of  that  which  must  be  regarded  as  a  supreme  and  ultimate 
Reality. 

This  way  of  accepting  and  naively  blending  the  dualistic 
and  the  monistic  views  has,  undoubtedly,  much  in  it  which 
needs  critical  investigation  and  readjustment,  if  it  is  to  be 
fitted  to  meet  the  more  profound  insights  and  needs  of  the 
scientific  and  reflective  mind.  But  there  is,  we  believe,  not  a 
single  essential  feature  of  the  portrait  it  draws  which  is  not 
true  to  the  real  facts  in  the  case.  And,  on  the  other  hand, 
there  is  not  a  single  fact  or  law  known  to  the  sciences  of 
human  nature,  whether  chemico-physical  or  psycho-physical 
and  psychical,  which  can  be  brought  to  bear  against  the  truth- 
fulness of  this  common-sense  view.  Reality,  as  these  sciences 
know  it,  would  seem  to  be  actually  constituted  on  this  same 
plan.  IT  is  a  system  of  beings,  in  which  there  are  selves  that 
know  themselves  to  have  a  unique  unity  and  incomparable 
separateness  from  all  other  beings ;  but  it  is  also  a  system  in 
which  these  beings  and  all  beings  are  bound  together  into  the 
higher  and  the  ultimate  unity  of  the  World-All. 

But  philosophy  inquires  as  to  how  this  Ultimate  Unity  shall 
be  so  constructed  by  reflective  thinking  as  best  to  satisfy  all 
the  conditions  involved.  To  this  question  epistemology  has 
already  pointed  out  the  approximate  and  provisional  answer. 
Reality,  in  order  to  be  known  as  this  ultimate  and  all-inclusive 
Unity,  must  be  conceived  of  as  having  all  the  characteristics 


590  DUALISM   AND  MONISM 

of  our  highest  ideal  of  a  Self.  For  it  is  only  a  SELF  that  pro- 
vides for  the  actualization  of  ideas,  and  for  a  Reality  that  is 
the  correlate  and  satisfaction  of  all  ideas.  Only  a  Self  can  be 
such  an  Ideal-Real  as  this  cognized  system  of  real  beings  and 
actual  transactions  is  known  to  be.  Besides  this,  it  is  only  in 
such  a  Self  that  the  principles  both  of  differentiation  and  of 
unification  can  be  satisfied.  If  Reality  actually  is  constructed, 
so  to  speak,  after  the  pattern  which  we  are  obliged  to  follow 
iii  our  fragmentary  and  wavering  cognition  of  its  manifold 
manifestations,  then  the  last  demand  of  a  critical  episte- 
mology  is  satisfied.  We  have  carried  the  epistemological 
problem  to  the  place  where  its  answer  merges  into  the  theory 
of  Reality. 


CHAPTER  XXI 

KNOWLEDGE  AND  THE  ABSOLUTE 

'THHERE  is  an  unsettled  strife  between  the  extreme  of 
-*-  agnosticism  and  an  uncritical  metaphysics  over  an- 
other problem  about  which  epistemological  investigation  has 
important  suggestions  to  offer.  This  problem  may  be  some- 
what indefinitely  stated  as  the  following  question :  Can  man 
know  the  Absolute  ?  Every  system  of  metaphysics,  and  in- 
deed every  fragmentary  proposition  of  an  ontological  char- 
acter, seems  compelled  to  make  some  sort  of  an  affirmative 
answer  to  this  question.  But  agnosticism  does  not  corre- 
spond to  its  title  unless  it  proposes  some  form  of  a  negative 
answer  to  the  same  question.  Here,  then,  there  seems  to 
arise  a  contradiction  which  admits  little  hope  of  being  ad- 
justed by  inducing  each  of  the  contending  parties  to  accept 
the  more  important  claims  of  the  other.  It  was  partly  this 
experience  of  the  race,  and  especially  of  the  generation  just 
preceding  his  own,  which  led  Kant  to  the  conclusion  that,  on 
the  one  hand,  reason  will  continue  to  cheat  even  the  wisest  of 
men  into  believing  that  they  can,  by  the  dialectic  of  illusion, 
reach  a  cognition  of  the  unconditioned,  and  yet,  on  the  other 
hand,  that  all  metaphysics,  as  a  credible  ontological  system, 
is  intrinsically  impossible. 

A  critical  examination,  however,  of  these  contradictory  ex- 
tremes —  with  their  "  Yes  "  on  one  side  and  "  No "  on  the 
other  side,  so  plumply  asserted  —  shows  that  neither  is  able 
to  state  its  positions  clearly  without  admitting  into  them  con- 
siderations of  a  modifying  order  taken  from  the  positions  of 
the  other.  The  unprejudiced  historical  critic  of  this  long- 


592  KNOWLEDGE   AND   THE   ABSOLUTE 

time  continued  and  unsettled  strife  might  safely  challenge  us 
to  produce  a  single  notable  combatant  on  the  side  of  agnosti- 
cism who  has  not  made  ample  confession  of  his  own  confi- 
dence in  certain  truths  proclaimed  by  the  philosophy  of  the 
Absolute  ;  and  there  are  few  among  the  most  daring  onto- 
logical  system-makers  who  do  not  at  times  show  signs  of  the 
consciousness  that  they  are  themselves  soaring  in  air  too  thin 
to  enable  even  the  wings  of  fancy  to  support  them  in  safety. 
If  we  needed  illustrations,  where  could  one  more  patent  and 
forcible  be  found  than  the  illustration  offered  by  the  great 
apostle  of  agnosticism  among  philosophical  writers  in  English  ? 
A  more  stupendous  system  of  alleged  cognitions  that  have 
an  absolute  value,  and  that  concern  ultimate  and  permanent 
entities  and  unalterable  truths,  has  never  been  put  forth  by 
any  reflective  mind  than  the  system  issued  under  cover  of  this 
agnosticism.  Hegel  and  Schopenhauer  were  not  more  con- 
fident and  dogmatic  in  their  ontology,  were  not  on  higher 
terms  of  professed  intimacy  with  the  Ultimate  Reality  of  the 
Universe,  than  is  Mr.  Herbert  Spencer.  Here  we  have 
"  Being,"  as  it  was  and  is  and  ever  will  be,  and  the  funda- 
mental law  of  all  "  Becoming,"  as  the  law  has  been,  is  now,  and 
will  continue  to  be,  calmly  and  confidently  set  forth  in  many 
volumes  by  a  finite  creature  of  the  nineteenth-century  order 
of  so-called  scientific  development.  To  what  height  above 
this  can  Absolutism  ever  venture  to  climb  ?  Not  only  the 
"  Transfigured  Realism "  and  the  formulas  which,  replete 
with  ontological  assumptions,  define  the  Ultimate  Reality, 
but  also  the  detailed  elaboration  of  the  agnostic  doctrine, 
from  its  opening  proposal  for  a  reconciliation  of  science  and 
religion  in  a  common  creed  of  nescience  to  its  final  words  on 
society,  is  one  huge  body  of  ontological  metaphysics. 

It  is  not  our  intention,  however,  to  reproach  Mr.  Spencer 
for  having  elaborated  a  doctrine  which  gives  the  complete 
anatomy  and  physiology  of  the  Absolute,  with  so  commenda- 
ble patience,  industry,  insight,  and  learning.  There  are 


KNOWLEDGE   AND  THE   ABSOLUTE  593 

many  others  whose  efforts  might  be  cited  in  illustration  of 
the  same  truth.  All  philosophy  or  attempt  at  philosophy, 
even  the  most  agnostic,  necessarily  assumes  some  sort  of  con- 
scious mental  relation  of  man  to  the  Absolute ;  but  on  the 
other  hand,  all  philosophy  or  attempt  at  philosophy,  however 
dogmatic,  is  forced  to  acknowledge  some  sort  of  a  limit  beyond 
which  any  such  relation  as  can  properly  be  called  "  knowledge" 
cannot  be  claimed  to  extend.  It  will  not  do  on  this  account 
to  resolve  the  conflict  between  the  extremes  of  agnosticism 
and  an  uncritical  metaphysics  into  a  mere  logomachy.  This 
shallow  and  indolent  way  of  treating  important  standing 
disputes  of  a  rational  kind  is  the  more  reprehensible  when 
applied  to  the  profound  and  difficult  problems  of  philosophy. 
The  path  which  reflective  thinking  follows  in  its  effort  to  give 
content  to  the  conception  of  the  Absolute  can  fitly  be  trodden 
only  by  the  most  serious  and  carefully  trained  minds.  It 
leads  to  many  difficult  and  profound  problems ;  the  rather  is 
it  strewn  with  such  problems.  These  problems,  like  all  those 
which  have  been  raised  in  the  last  several  chapters,  must  find 
their  fuller  solution,  if  at  all,  in  other  forms  of  philosophical 
discipline.  But  the  question  "  Can  man  know  the  Abso- 
lute.? "  concerns,  not  only  the  constitution  of  the  conception 
answering  to  a  term  which  is  capable  of  such  varying  mean- 
ings (the  "Absolute"),  but  also  the  nature  of  knowledge, 
and  the  character  of  the  relation  to  his  object  in  which  the 
knower  is  placed.  It  is  for  these  and  other  kindred  reasons 
that  epistemology  has  certain  suggestions  to  offer  in  answer 
to  this  problem. 

The  previous  detailed  consideration  of  the  philosophy  of 
knowledge  has  led  us  far  enough  to  see  that  there  are  certain 
fixed  and  unalterable  "  momenta "  which  belong  to  human 
knowledge,  whether  it  be  considered  subjectively  and  as'  an 
affair  of  human  mental  life,  or  trans-subjectively  as  impli- 
cating the  real  beings  and  actual  transactions  of  the  world  of 
things.  It  is  possible,  then,  that  in  some  sense  of  the  word 

38 


594  KNOWLEDGE   AND   THE   ABSOLUTE 

"  absolute  "  a  good  and  fair  correspondent  for  it  may  be  some- 
how provided  —  at  least  suggestively  —  by  the  theory  of  knowl- 
edge. It  is  not  simply  possible,  but  it  is  perfectly  obvious, 
that  there  are  current  meanings  of  the  term  "  The  Absolute," 
which  cannot  be  accepted  ;  for  they  are  incompatible  with  the 
very  nature  of  cognition  and  with  the  entire  relation  to  the 
trans-subjective  which  cognition  implies.  Claims  to  a  knowl- 
edge of  the  Absolute,  as  set  forth  in  such  terms,  will  have  to 
be  dismissed  as  soon  as  their  character  is  disclosed ;  knowl- 
edge itself  is  known  to  bear  a  fixed  and  unalterable  character 
which  will  not  tolerate  them.  For  example,  if  by  "  the  Abso- 
lute "  it  is  meant  to  designate  that  which  is  totally  unrelated, 
—  absolute,  because  absolved  from  all  conceivable  relations 
and,  as  it  were,  spoiled  or  dishonored  by  being  brought  under 
the  category  of  relation,  —  then  there  is  little  need  to  discuss 
the  question,  whether  man  can  know  such  an  absolute.  The  re- 
lation of  subject  and  object  has  been  found  so  fundamental  that 
cognition  cannot  exist,  even  in  the  barest  outline  of  its  con- 
ception, without  this  relation  being  set  into  reality.  Further, 
every  concrete  cognition  is  an  actually  established  relation 
between  the  mind  and  its  object ;  and  it  is  a  relation  in  which 
the  dependence  of  the  mind  on  reality  for  entering  into 'this 
relation  is  emphasized,  although  the  dependence  of  the  reality 
of  the  object  on  the  mind's  willing,  feeling,  and  thinking  is 
never  wholly  abrogated  or  annulled.  And  if  we  take  the 
trans-subjective  point  of  view,  and  have  regard  to  the  nature  of 
real  things  as  known  to  the  mind,  the  category  of  relation  is 
that  characteristic  which,  above  all  others,  they  wear  most 
manifestly  as  their  very  own.  To  speak,  then,  of  a  knowledge 
of  the  totally  unrelated,  or  of  that  which  must  be  conceived  of 
as  incapable  of  relations,  whether  shrinking  from  them,  or 
shirking  them,  or  being  too  pure  and  high,  or  too  remote  and 
unsubstantial  to  undertake  them,  involves  a  contradiction  in 
terms  which  needs  no  refutation ;  it  is  too  glaring  to  be  put 
into  intelligible  language. 


KNOWLEDGE  AND  THE  ABSOLUTE  595 

Nor  is  knowledge  of  the  Absolute  possible  if  this  word 
must  be  identified  with  the  unchanging,  —  with  that  which  is 
absolved  from  all  alterations  of  its  own  states  or  of  the  rela- 
tions in  which  these  states  stand  to  human  cognitive  con- 
sciousness. Reality,  conceived  of  as  One  and  permanently  the 
same,  as  respects  both  its  own  internal  being  and  also  its 
interactions  with  the  cognitive  subject,  cannot  be  an  object  of 
human  knowledge.  For  the  very  nature  of  cognition  is  such 
that  it  must  represent  in  changing  and  yet  orderly  sequent 
states  of  the  cognitive  subject  the  real  being  and  actual  trans- 
actions of  things.  Knowledge  is  an  ever  varying  life  of  a 
Self ;  and  beings,  in  reality,  must  "  live  up  to  it,"  in  order 
that  they  may  become  the  objects  of  knowledge.  To  suppose 
that  Reality  is  dead  and  inactive,  or  is  a  monotonous  being- 
related  of  a  Ding-an-sich,  that  is  loath  to  change  in  any  man- 
ner which  may  serve  as  the  actual  ground  and  correlate  of 
the  changes  of  the  human  life  of  cognition,  is  to  render  the 
truthfulness  of  all  cognition  invalid.  The  process  of  know- 
ing is  not,  indeed,  a  mere  copy  of  what  is,  and  is  going  on,  in 
the  trans-subjective  object  of  knowledge.  But  it  could  not  be 
that  confident  and  warm  commerce  with  the  world  of  real 
beings  and  of  their  actual  transactions  which  it  purports  to 
be,  unless  varied  action  and  fulness  of  life  could  be  con- 
ceived of  as  characteristic  of  its  object.  They,  the  things  that 
are  not-mc,  the  other  selves  and  the  things  they  perceive,  are 
all  alive.  They  constitute  for  me,  and  for  every  cognitive 
subject,  an  all-embracing  Life  of  varied  changes  in  which  the 
Ego,  by  cognition  and  by  the  action  which  cognition  induces 
and  guides,  takes  its  subordinate  part.  This  view  which  re- 
gards the  nature  of  things  as  centres,  systematically  ordered, 
of  unceasing  changes  which  the  cognitive  subject  partially 
but,  with  an  increasing  degree  of  truthfulness  and  in  depend- 
ence upon  the  growth  of  cognition,  mentally  represents,  is 
the  scientific  and  the  philosophic  view.  The  Reality,  thus 
revealed  in  its  most  permanent  and  unchanging  characteris- 


596  KNOWLEDGE   AND  THE   ABSOLUTE 

tics,  is  not  devoid  of  life  in  time  or  of  ceaseless  change ;  the 
rather  is  it  the  ground  and  essential  inner  principle  of  all 
changes,  and  the  Life  of  all  living  and  non-living  things. 
Only  as  Itself  actualizing  all  the  true  formulas  for  the  chang- 
ing relations  of  things,  and  thus  affording  the  ultimate  ex- 
planation of  the  varied  cognitions  of  these  changing  relations 
which  different  minds  represent  as  their  subjective  experi- 
ences, can  this  Reality  be  known  at  all.  Its  very  claim  to  be 
thought  of  as  Absolute  depends  upon  its  being  able  to  satisfy 
in  reality  the  demands  for  a  trans-subjective  ground  of  all 
subjective  changes. 

Once  more,  the  very  nature  of  cognitive  faculty  forbids 
making  the  Absolute  an  object  of  knowledge  after  this  object 
has  been,  by  a  process  of  abstraction,  stripped  of  all  definite 
and  representable  content.  If  by  the  terms  employed  it  is 
meant  to  designate  that  which  is  absolved  from  all  particular 
relations,  so  that  the  human  mind  is  obliged  to  hold  and  to  say 
nothing  positive  about  it  —  an  Absolute  =  an  X,  whose  value 
can  never  be  determined,  even  with  the  remotest  degree  of 
approximation  —  then,  too,  it  is  idle  to  discuss  the  possibility 
of  finding  such  an  object  of  knowledge.  That  which  has  no 
positive  characteristics  that  are  presentable  or  representable 
in  consciousness,  cannot  be  known.  Purely  negative  and 
limiting  concepts,  if  such  concepts  there  be  in  themselves 
considered,  must  not  be  confused  with  cognitions.  On  this 
point,  the  Kantian  caution  remains  forever  commendable. 

To  speak  in  homely  fashion  the  plain  truth  about  this  word, 
it  would  seem  that  it  should  not  be  employed  except  as  an 
adjective  to  qualify  some  noun  whose  meaning  must  have  been 
previously  stated  in  terms  of  positive  knowledge.  "  The 
Absolute  "  is  nought ;  by  itself,  it  is  mere  refusal  to  think,  to 
give  any  positive  content  or  discernible  direction  to  the  stream 
of  consciousness.  What  is  it  about  which  the  qualification  of 
absoluteness,  in  some  definite  meaning  of  this  qualification,  is 
affirmed  or  denied  ?  —  this  is  the  question  which  must  always 


KNOWLEDGE   AND  THE   ABSOLUTE  597 

follow  immediately  upon  the  proposal  to  discuss  the  problem 
of  knowledge  and  the  Absolute.  To  such  a  question  one  must 
always  answer  in  terms  of  Some  Being,  about  which  there  is 
thinking  to  be  done ;  it  is  affirmed  or  denied  that  this  Being 
can  be  really  existent,  if  it  is  thought  of  as  freed,  or  absolved, 
from  certain  particular  sets  of  relations.  But  the  "  absolu- 
tion "  from  certain  relations  thus  granted  or  denied  can 
never  destroy  all  the  positive  content  of  thought  that  belongs 
to  the  Being  which  is  the  claimant  for  absolution.  The 
moment  the  predicate  of  absoluteness  ceases  to  be  relative, 
that  is,  to  apply  to  certain  relations  only,  that  moment  the  ob- 
jectivity for  possible  cognition  also  ceases.  In  other  words, 
whatever  I  know  is  some  thing  known  to  be  existent  thus 
rather  than  otherwise.  Whatever  1  conceive  of  must  have 
content  for  its  conception.  Whatever  I  think  about,  however 
vaguely,  and  whatever  I  conjecture,  however  unwarrantably, 
must  be  thought  about  and  conjectured  with  reference  to 
some  positive  experience  of  Reality  —  either  of  my  Self  or 
Things  —  somehow  delimited  or  defined.  You  cannot  know 
Nought.  You  cannot  know,  or  know  about,  the  Absolute,  if 
by  this  term  you  mean  to  designate  the  negation  of  all  posi- 
tive and  particular  characteristics. 

It  is  a  suggestion  which  is  found  to  be  as  hopeful  and  com- 
forting from  the  point  of  view  of  man's  practical  necessities 
as  it  is  promising  in  epistemology  and  metaphysics,  that  the 
enrichment  in  content  of  the  conception  of  the  Absolute  is 
better  than  its  impoverishment.  Reality  is  not  best  conceived 
of,  in  its  sum-total  and  complete  significance,  as  a  barren  and 
characterless  affair.  It  is  not  dignified  or  gratified  most  by 
being  placed  remote  from  the  work-a-day  life  and  varied  cog- 
nitions of  humanity ;  it  receives  no  added  crown  on  being 
banished  to  the  death-kingdom  of  abstract  thought.  There 
is  more  that  the  man  of  science  knows  how  to  ex- 
plain, more  than  philosophy  can  give  complete  insight  into, 
that  meets  the  worshipper  when  he  makes  his  fetish  of  the 


598  KNOWLEDGE   AND   THE  ABSOLUTE 

commonest  materials.  The  Platonic  ideas  do  not  fear  con- 
tamination from  the  dust  and  the  mire  of  daily  life.  To  every 
man  the  message  of  Reality  comes  :  this  "  word  is  nigh  thee, 
even  in  thy  mouth,  and  in  thy  heart."  The  absolution  from 
illegitimate  bounds  is  much  greater  when  we  begin  to  try  to 
tell  ourselves  all  which  Reality  may  be  affirmed  to  be,  than 
when  we  seek  to  guard  it  carefully  from  being  qualified  too 
richly  and  too  manifoldly,  by  rehearsing  what  it  is  not.  But 
whether  one  affirm  or  deny,  both  affirmation  and  denial  have 
significance  for  human  consciousness  only  as  they  are  clothed 
with  some  positive  content.  Then,  and  only  then,  can  affir- 
mation or  denial  enter  into  a  contention  that  at  least  has 
a  meaning  and  a  possible  outcome,  whether  terms  can  ever 
be  discovered  for  a  complete  reconcilement  or  not. 

Having  thus  safeguarded  our  word  from  a  complete  lack  of 
significance  we  may  receive  from  epistemology  three  kinds  of 
suggestions  which  have  a  bearing  upon  the  problem  of  knowl- 
edge and  the  Absolute.  One  of  these  suggestions  comes  from  an 
analysis  of  the  subjective  nature  of  knowledge ;  another  takes 
note  chiefly  of  the  relation  which  knowledge  establishes  be- 
tween subject  and  its  object,  considered  as  really  existent ;  and 
the  third  arises  from  the  somewhat  vague  and  yet  important 
doctrine  of  Reality  to  which  the  theory  of  knowledge  points 
the  way.  The  very  behavior  of  the  mind  in  its  cognitive  activ- 
ity, even  when  regarded  as  a  subjective  affair,  suggests  the 
presence  in  consciousness  of  that  which  is  entitled  to  be  called 
"  absolute."  The  different  particular  factors  of  the  substance 
of  knowledge  may  all  be  regarded  as  relative  and  capable  of 
indefinite  variations  according  to  no  permanent  and  unchang- 
ing standard.  There  are  so  many  of  each  kind  of  sensations 
—  a  quite  indefinite  and  seemingly  unregulated  number  —  for 
every  individual ;  there  are  so  many  myriads  of  color-sensa- 
tions for  A  and  an  unlike  number  for  jB,  as  the  accidents  of 
birth  and  of  the  excitations  of  environment  happen  to  fall. 
Nor  is  the  case  different  with  other  sensations,  except  as,  for 


KNOWLEDGE  AND  THE  ABSOLUTE  599 

some  unknown  reason,  the  numbers  are  increased  or  dimin- 
ished. Color-sensations  are  representable  by  a  triangle  with 
a  curved  apex,  from  which  the  bottom  has  dropped  off ;  but 
sensations  of  sound  are  represented  better  by  a  straight  line 
which  has  neither  beginning  nor  end  ;  and  smells  may  not 
be  easily  plotted  according  to  any  kind  of  curve.  Nor  does 
the  particular  order  which  the  serial  states  assume  in  the 
stream  of  consciousness  seem  to  be  subject  to  absolute  and 
predetermined  rules.  Looking  at  any  mental  life  merely 
content-wise,  as  such  and  so  much  of  sensation,  ideation,  con- 
scious motor  activity,  etc.,  everything  seems  relative  to  every- 
thing else.  Change  is  mere  change.  No  ruler  over  all 
appears.  But  with  the  total  life  of  cognition,  viewed  as  it 
appears  to  epistemological  analysis,  the  case  is  not  so.  For 
such  analysis  discloses  certain  limiting  and  guiding  principles 
that  define  the  life  of  cognition  as  a  rational  striving  toward 
some  form  of  that  which  has  value  in  itself.  This  conscious- 
ness of  the  Absolute  that  every  cognitive  subject  carries 
within  his  breast,  is  naively  expressed  by  the  plain  man  in 
the  satisfaction  he  feels  respecting  the  unconditioned  truthful- 
ness and  the  worth,  for  all  rational  minds,  of  certain  of 
his  own  thoughts  and  ideas.  The  more  ignorant  he  is,  per- 
chance, the  surer  he  is  that  the  very  trutli  of  God,  and  the 
truth  of  all  the  ages,  resides  within  himself.  In  his  narrow 
and  shallow  stream  of  consciousness  he  feels  flowing  the 
waters  that  come  from  the  celestial  hills,  and  that  are  passing 
on  to  the  ocean  of  Infinity.  He  knows  that  he  is,  and  Nature 
is ;  and  that  behind  and  beneath  both,  there  is  Another  —  with 
a  strength  and  tenacity  of  conviction  which  will  not  be  gain- 
said. He  attains  to  such  a  sufficiency  of  knowledge  that  he 
freely  calls  the  Universe  to  account  for  itself  at  the  bar  of  his 
judgment.  Splendid  audacity,  but  as  amazing  as  it  is  splendid  ! 
For  have  not  positivist,  and  agnostic,  and  the  disciples  of  the 
critical  philosophy  exposed  the  fallacy  of  all  this,  with  untir- 
ing patience  and  tiresome  prolixity  ?  But  the  plain  man  goes 


600  KNOWLEDGE  AND  THE  ABSOLUTE 

steadily  on,  handing  in  his  practical  adherence  to  another  form 
of  epistemological  doctrine.  He  is  a  born  absolutist  with 
respect  to  the  rights  of  his  own  cognitive  faculty. 

And  when  we  extend  our  psychological  analysis  of  knowl- 
edge in  such  thorough  way  as  to  merge  it  in  epistemological 
criticism,  we  discover  the  warrant  for  this  universal  confidence 
in  the  absoluteness  of  certain  states  of  human  consciousness. 
To  the  theory  of  knowledge  the  stream  of  consciousness  is  no 
longer  an  inconstant  flux  of  psychoses.  It  is  the  life  of  a 
rational  being  who  gropes  after  truth,  and  stretches  out  his 
hands  toward  the  Infinite  and  the  Unconditioned,  and  betimes 
lays  a  satisfying  grasp  upon  a  portion  of  that  for  which  he 
feels  destined  to  strive.  In  this  life,  considered  as  a  subjec- 
tive affair  but  also  considered  in  respect  of  the  profounder 
depths  of  its  subjectivity,  change  is  not  mere  change  ;  nor  is 
each  factor  purely  relative  to  something  else  which  is  alike 
fleeting  and  conditionated.  But  all  states  appear  —  in  addition 
to  the  relations  they  sustain  to  each  other  —  as  relative  to  the 
one  subject  of  them  all.  Every  state  must  indeed  be  related  to 
antecedent  states  ;  and  so  it  is  capable  of  partial  explanation 
as  sequent  to  and  consequent  upon  these  antecedent  states. 
But  every  state  must  also  be  regarded  as  relative  to  a  Self 
whose  it  is,  as  all  these  other  states  have  been,  and  as 
all  succeeding  states  will  be.  And  now  we  discover  that 
this  subject  of  the  states,  this  Self,  is  not  a  characterless 
affair.  What  it  is,  cannot  be  made  wholly  dependent  upon 
its  states  and  relative  to  them  —  a  mere  summing-up  of  the 
events  which  they  are.  It  has  a  nature  that  is  fixed,  unchang- 
ing, of  its  own.  In  our  ignorance  of  the  depth,  the  breadth, 
and  the  significance  of  this  fact,  we  regard  this  so-called 
"  nature  "  as  theoretically  divisible  into  two  portions  or  sets 
of  characteristics.  Of  these  one  is  the  nature  of  the  individ- 
ual Self  and  the  other  is  the  nature  which  the  individual  has, 
and  shares,  in  common  with  the  race. 

Of  every  man  it  must  be  said  that  he  has  the  cognitive  con- 


KNOWLEDGE  AND  THE  ABSOLUTE  601 

stitution  of  humanity,  and  also  that  he  has  something  which 
limits  and  determines  the  character  of  his  life  of  cognition, 
and  which  is  peculiarly  his  own.  Biology  and  anthropology 
strive  to  regard  both  these  sources  of  contribution  to  what  is 
the  independent  and  unconditioned,  in  comparison  with  the 
dependent  and  relative  character  of  the  successive  states,  as 
themselves  dependent  upon  and  relative  to  the  antecedent 
members  of  the  race  of  men,  or  of  other  races  of  animals 
lower  down  in  the  scale  which  sets  the  standard  of  values. 
This  is  their  legitimate  task  as  laborers  in  the  fields  of  the 
growing  science  of  man.  But  all  that  they  have  to  disclose 
only  carries  the  same  inquiry  further  back ;  or  rather  by  their 
digging  about  the  roots  of  humanity,  they  only  carry  the  need 
of  a  limit  to  all  explanations,  further  out  and  deeper  down. 
For  this  picture  of  the  development  of  human  beings  as  a  race 
that  has  Selfhood,  which  perchance  sprung,  after  the  flesh, 
from  races  that  had  it  not,  is  no  more  successful  in  freeing 
our  minds  from  the  recognition  of  what  is  absolute  and  uncon- 
ditioned in  human  consciousness  than  is  the  picture  which 
descriptive  psychology  presents  of  the  development  of  a  single 
soul.  The  real  question  at  issue  is  not  as  to  when,  or  by 
what  stages,  man  comes  to  the  consciousness  of  something 
absolute  as  given  in  his  own  cognitive  being,  but  as  to  the 
significance  of  the  fact  that  epistemological  insight  finds  the 
absolute  as  already,  somehow,  consciously  there. 

If,  however,  a  more  detailed  statement  is  required  as  to 
what  there  is  in  the  cognitive  experience  of  men  which  war- 
rants us  in  affirming  the  implied  presence  of  what  must  be 
called  "  the  Absolute,"  our  answer  might  be  drawn  from 
almost  the  entire  body  of  the  discussions  which  are  now  about 
to  close.  It  will  suffice  to  remind  one  who  is  inclined  to  be 
thoughtful  at  this  point  that  the  constitutional  laws  of  the 
cognitive  faculty,  and  the  character  of  the  object  cognized  in 
every  act  of  developed  self-consciousness,  both  warrant  us  in 
speaking  of  the  matter  in  this  way.  Here,  of  course,  demon- 


602  KNOWLEDGE   AND   THE   ABSOLUTE 

stration  is  impossible;  but  attention  can  be  called  to  facts, 
and  to  their  apparent  significance.  Certain  principles,  un- 
changing and  of  unconditioned  value,  are  found  immanent  in 
all  the  life  of  cognitive  faculty.  To  regard  them  as  relative 
and  changeable,  either  in  the  life  of  the  individual  or  of  the 
race,  is  to  try  to  set  into  terms  acceptable  to  reason  the  irra- 
tional and  the  absurd.  For  example,  suppose  that  it  is  pro- 
posed to  deny,  at  first,  and  then  to  test,  in  accordance  with 
any  given  psychological  or  anthropological  theory,  the  validity 
of  the  principles  of  identity  and  of  sufficient  reason.  This 
theory  itself  is  absolutely  dependent,  for  its  existence  and  for 
such  poor  claims  to  acceptance  as  it  may  possess,  upon  the 
unconditioned  worth  of  these  principles,  and  upon  the  mind's 
absolute  and  unchanging  trust  in  them.  Is  what  we  call  hu- 
man reason  itself  a  development  ?  Are  the  fundamental  prin- 
ciples of  cognitive  faculty  in  man  a  product  from  the  evolution 
of  things  or  of  animals  that  are  wholly  without  such  principles  ? 
This  is  totally  unthinkable.  The  very  attempt  to  think  it 
brings  out  the  truth  that  human  cognition,  become  self- 
conscious  and  critical,  is  compelled  to  recognize  the  presence 
of  something  absolute  in  human  consciousness,  —  in  the  form 
of  those  fundamental  cognitive  principles  to  which  all  par- 
ticular cognitions  are  relative,  but  which  cannot  themselves  be 
regarded  as  dependent  upon  those  cognitions  or  upon  the 
particular  objects  cognized. 

Nor  is  this  presence  of  the  absolute  in  the  life  of  human 
cognition  a  purely  formal  affair.  There  is  a  being  given  to  us 
in  the  activities  of  this  life  which,  in  some  sort,  worthily  rep- 
resents its  own  presence  as  an  actuality ;  it  is  the  being  whose 
cognitive  constitution  embraces  in  its  formal  aspect  the  idea 
of  that  which  is  not  dependent,  but  which  is  itself  the  ground 
upon  which  the  particular  experiences  repose.  This  being  is 
the  self-known  Self.  So  long  as  I  take  the  purely  subjective 
point  of  view,  the  one  being  which  I  know,  as  setting  the  limits 
to,  and  making  rules  for,  all  other  beings,  but  which  itself 


KNOWLEDGE   AND  THE  ABSOLUTE  603 

appears  as  the  self-determining  source  of  all  limitations  and 
rules,  is  the  subject  of  cognition.  It  knows  itself  to  be  both 
active  and  passive ;  but  both  in  action  and  in  suffering  alike,  it 
is  the  one  to  whom  all  the  varied  changes  belong.  They  may 
come  and  they  may  go,  but  it  is.  "  It  is  : "  the  meaning  of  such 
an  affirmation,  so  far  as  an  answer  can  be  given,  it  belongs  to 
the  metaphysics  of  mind  to  disclose.1  But  that  the  Self  does 
posit  its  own  being  as  the  unconditioned  source,  subjectively 
considered,  of  all  the  shifting  and  relative  psychoses  in  the 
stream  of  consciousness,  there  can  be  no  doubt.  In  some  sort, 
then,  when  the  question,  "  How  can  man  know  the  Absolute  ?" 
is  raised,  it  may  be  answered  by  an  appeal  to  all  his  cognitive 
experience.  The  answer  may  be  made  in  terms  of  no  unmean- 
ing figure  of  speech :  Look  within  thyself  ;  for  this  "  word  is 
nigh  thee,  in  thy  mouth,  and  in  thy  heart." 

If  now  knowledge  is  regarded  as  a  relation  established  be- 
tween the  knower  and  the  realities  which  he  regards  as  not 
himself,  other  glimpses  of  the  presence  and  the  meaning  of 
the  absolute  within  and  without  human  cognitive  conscious- 
ness may  be.  gained.  Here  analysis  deals  directly  with  what 
is  relative,  as  the  very  phrase  to  be  analyzed  proclaims.  Cog- 
nition, considered  as  a  relation,  has  been  seen  to  be  one  of 
reciprocal  influence  and  determination.  I  determine  the 
object  of  my  own  cognition  ;  and  thus  it  is  for  its  very  being  — 
that  it  is,  and  what  it  is  as  my  object  —  dependent  upon  me. 
By  a  process  which  involves  all  my  powers,  my  entire  being, 
alid  which  terminates  in  a  cognitive  judgment,  I  influence 
and  mould  it  so  as  to  make  it  my  own.  So  that  from  this 
point  of  view,  if  one  should  venture  to  speak  of  attaining  to  a 
knowledge  of  the  Absolute,  such  knowledge  could  only  be  on 
the  condition  that  this  absolute  should  submit  itself  to  the 
human  mind,  to  be  felt,  reasoned  about,  mentally  seized  and 
appropriated,  after  being  intellectually  moulded  "  to  our  mind." 
We  may  call  this  "accommodation,"  or  " condescension,"  or 

1  See  the  chapter  on  "The  Reality  of  the  Mind,"  in  "  Philosophy  of  Mind." 


604  KNOWLEDGE  AND  THE  ABSOLUTE 

what  we  will ;  but  the  very  nature  of  cognition,  as  a  relation 
of  my  being  to  other  being,  implies  that  it  is  so.  Turning  the 
transaction  about,  however,  it  appears,  with  even  more  clear- 
ness of  insight  and  confidence  of  conviction,  that  in  this  very 
cognitive  relation,  I  am  dependent  upon  some  other  being  not- 
myself.  This  being,  which  is  to  be  or  has  already  become  my 
object,  influences  and  determines  me.  Its  will  makes  itself 
felt  as  an  invincible  and  limiting  barrier,  that  is  no  dead  wall 
of  resistance,  but  an  expression  of  a  force  in  which  the  tele- 
ology of  immanent  ideas  is  manifest,  upon  my  will.  Its  quali- 
fications of  sensuous  and  other  kinds  incite  and  guide  me  to 
a  knowledge  of  it  —  that  it  is  and  what  it  is  —  which  I  am 
persuaded  is  true  to  the  facts  of  its  being  and  its  living  reality. 
When  the  cognitive  relation  between  us  is  once  established,  as 
well  as  during  all  the  while  that  it  is  inchoate  and  developing, 
both  /  and  It  are  taking  part  in  a  transaction  which  requires 
for  its  very  existence  the  help  of  us  both. 

Moreover,  the  various  modifications  of  the  relation  of  knowl- 
edge between  the  knower  and  things  known  appear  almost 
infinite.  No  individual  knower  is  precisely  like  any  other. 
No  single  cognition  on  the  part  of  any  individual  knower  is 
certain  to  be  precisely  like  any  other.  And  the  reality  of  the 
things  appears  more  than  abundantly  able  to  satisfy,  in  its 
own  changing  moods,  the  demands  made  upon  it  that  it  shall 
furnish  its  full  share  in  contribution  to  these  manifold  modifi- 
cations. The  relations  of  the  mind  and  things,  in  man's 
knowledge  of  them,  thus  seem  themselves  to  be  relative  and 
lacking  in  all  fixedness  and  independence  of  character. 

To  all  this,  however,  there  is  another  side.  This  other  side 
is  dimly  apprehended  and  borne  witness  to  by  the  conscious- 
ness of  the  multitude.  We  may  not  choose  to  give  the  name 
"  cognition  "  to  this  consciousness  ;  it  may  seem  more  appro- 
priate to  call  it  a  faith,  a  hope,  an  impression,  or  by  some 
other  term  of  emotion.  But  the  analysis  of  knowledge  shows 
that  it  is  an  attitude  of  the  mind,  or  a  factor  in  the  attitude  of 


KNOWLEDGE  AND  THE  ABSOLUTE  605 

mind,  which  all  men  take  toward  the  objects  of  knowledge. 
Things  change  the  relations  in  which,  the  terms  on  which, 
they  will  allow  themselves  to  be  cognized  by  us.  What  they 
mean  by  these  changes,  it  is  often,  perhaps  universally,  diffi- 
cult to  say  with  any  degree  of  confidence.  We  have  to  take 
them  as  they  are,  and  make  the  best  guesses  possible  as  to 
what  they  will  be.  But  we  must  also  trust  them  ;  and  on  the 
whole  we  find  them  worthy  of  being  trusted.  For  they,  too, 
obey  laws  and,  in  some  sort  at  least,  follow  ends.  They  have 
"  mind  in  them  ; "  otherwise  they  could  not  be  "  minded  by 
us."  Yet,  further,  we  venture  to  believe  that  they  wish  us 
well  —  at  least  to  some  extent,  and  in  some  of  their  manifold 
changing  relations  to  us.  This  faith  in  the  good-will  and 
rationality  of  things,  as  setting  some  sort  of  a  limit  to  the 
relations  into  which  we  enter  with  them,  in  the  act  of  knowl- 
edge, is  a  part  of  the  act  of  knowledge  itself.  Even  when  we 
"  look  out "  for  things,  lest  they  may  hurt  us,  we  continue  to 
trust  them  to  furnish  the  signs  of  their  intention  toward  us. 
Some  of  them  are  treacherous  indeed ;  but  even  gunpowder 
and  dynamite  have  been  studied,  and  the  relations  they  are 
willing  to  sustain  to  us  in  action  have  been  made  objects 
of  knowledge.  Even  the  most  capricious  of  the  bacteria  we 
live  in  the  hope  of  knowing  well  enough  to  escape,  and  perhaps 
to  use  for  the  furtherance  of  human  good.  The  path  which 
electricity  chooses  to  travel,  under  all  conceivable  circum- 
stances, will  some  day  be  discovered. 

Thus  do  the  very  relations  into  which  man's  knowledge  of 
the  world  of  real  beings  and  actual  transactions  brings  him 
themselves  appear  to  faith  and  to  hope  as  the  manifestations 
of  absolute  will  and  of  its  unchanging,  immanent  ideas. 
Something  absolute  in  them  seems  to  set  the  limit  to  what 
would  otherwise  be  unintelligible  change  in  their  ways  of 
behavior  relative  to  us,  and  such  unmanageable  caprice  as  to 
make  life  impossible  for  the  race  of  men.  But  this  faith  and 
hope  are  both  born  of  experience  and  are  also  the  mother  and 


606  KNOWLEDGE   AND   THE  ABSOLUTE 

nurse  of  experience.  They  suggest  and  guide  the  individual 
cognitions ;  they  are  nourished  and  expanded  or  corrected,  by 
the  individual  cognitions.  They  are  significant  of  the  great 
truth  which  is  postulated  as  a  faith,  and  confirmed  as  a 
theory,  by  all  knowledge  considered  as  a  system  of  changing 
relations  between  the  mind  and  things.  Things  are  not  mere 
things,  if  by  this  it  be  meant  that  they  are  all  to  be  regarded 
as  completely  explained  by  the  relations  they  sustain  to  one 
another  and  to  us,  and  by  enumerating  the  series  of  the 
changes  which  these  relations  undergo.  It  is  not,  then,  an 
unwarrantable  conjecture,  or  the  substitution  of  an  unmean- 
ing figure  of  speech  for  a  reasonable  proposition  when  it  is 
affirmed  :  Things  are  the  manifestation,  the  word  to  man,  of 
an  all-pervading  Will  and  Mind.  There  is  that  in  Things 
which  irresistibly  and  forever  determines  the  relations  under 
which  they  shall  become  known  to  man.  This  unconditioned 
and  unchanging  being  of  which  they  partake,  which  gives 
to  them  the  conditions  of  all  their  relations  to  us,  and  which 
is  the  permanent  ground  of  all  the  changes  they  undergo,  is 
the  Absolute.  Faith  in  it  is  the  guaranty  of  human  cognitive 
experience ;  this  experience  itself  constitutes  its  perpetual 
recognition. 

Something  that  may  be  called  "  absolute  "  is,  therefore,  found 
to  be  present  in  all  the  cognitive  life  of  man  as  seen  from  the 
subjective  point  of  view.  Something  that  may  be  called  ab- 
solute is  the  postulate,  held  by  his  primitive  faith  and  con- 
firmed by  the  growth  of  his  cognition,  which  inheres  in  that 
relation  of  the  Self  and  Things  in  which  cognition  consists. 
May  we,  however,  form  a  conception  which  shall  include  all 
selves  and  all  things,  considered  under  all  actual  and  possible 
terms  of  relation,  as  dependent  upon  this  conception ;  and 
may  we  then  assert  reality  for  that  conception  as  a  possible 
object  of  knowledge  ?  We  believe  that  an  affirmative  answer 
to  this  question  is  suggested  by  the  truths  which  have  been 
established  as  belonging  to  the  philosophy  of  knowledge. 


KNOWLEDGE  AND  THE  ABSOLUTE  607 

Sucli  a  conception  cannot,  indeed,  be  the  correlate  of  the 
Unrelated,  of  the  One  and  Unchanging,  or  of  the  merely 
abstract  and  undefined  Ground  of  all  relations  and  of  all 
change.  But  it  would  seem  that  this  conception  must  take 
the  form  of  an  Absolute  Self.  a  It  would  seem "  so ;  if,  in- 
deed, the  suggestions  which  epistemology  has  furnished  with 
regard  to  the  innermost  nature  of  Reality  can  be  elaborated 
by  metaphysics  in  a  satisfactory  way.  For  it  has  been  shown 
that  the  fundamental  and  unchanging  characteristics  of  cog- 
nition reach  their  supreme  manifestation  in  self-knowledge. 
Here  the  object  is  most  immediately  and  fully  given  to  the 
subject,  as  it  really  is,  and  so  as  to  embrace  the  discernment 
of  intellect, the  warm  conviction  of  truth,  and  the  vital  seizure 
of  will  —  all  in  the  highest  degree  obtainable  by  human  cog- 
nitive faculty.  It  is  the  being  of  my  Self  which  I  most  fully, 
indubitably,  and  tenaciously  make  the  object  of  knowledge. 
And  as  I  consider  all  which  is  involved  in  such  cognition  I 
find  that  something  absolute  is  known  as  present  in  my  con- 
sciousness, no  matter  how  subjectively  directed  my  considera- 
tion may  be. 

Yet  again,  that  which  is  not-myself  —  whether  other  selves 
or  so-called  things  —  I  know  to  be,  only  as  it  is  somehow 
qualified  in  terms  that  can  be  vivified  and  verified  by  an 
appeal  to  my  self-known  Self.  That  things  are,  I  cannot 
doubt ;  that  they  are  not-me  I  know  as  incontestably  as  that 
I  myself  am.  But  what  are  they  ?  —  this  raises  a  question 
which  admits  of  answer  only  as  I  am  permitted  to  use  anal- 
ogies derived  from  my  experience  with  myself.  Upon  this 
use  of  analogies,  however,  every  man  insists.  Without  as- 
suming and,  in  his  growth  of  knowledge,  constantly  evincing 
the  truth  of  this  proposition,  all  science  and  all  philosophy 
cease  to  be  knowledge  and  become  something  less  than 
consistent  dreaming.  Indeed,  when  it  is  considered  how 
experience  itself  cannot  be  built  up,  or  subjected  to  sceptical 
criticism,  without  admitting  its  own  transcendency,  the 


608  KNOWLEDGE  AND   THE  ABSOLUTE 

"  proof "  of  this  assumption  is  seen  to  lie  in  the  fact  that 
the  mind  has  any  standard  of  thinking  and  judging  whatever. 
And  when  the  teleology  of  knowledge,  and  the  ethical  and 
aesthetical  "  momenta "  which  enter  into  it,  are  taken  into 
the  account,  warrant  appears  for  saying  that  the  very  struc- 
ture and  growth  of  knowledge  shows  Reality  to  be  a  larger 
and  all-inclusive  Self.  But  now  since  it  is  on  this  Reality 
that  we  are  dependent,  and  since  it  is  its  Nature  which  gives 
to  things  their  relative  natures  and  positions  with  relation  to 
one  another  and  to  us,  why  should  we  hesitate  to  speak  of 
Reality  as  the  Absolute  Self  ? 

Can  man  know  the  Absolute  ?  Are  Knowledge  and  Abso- 
luteness terms  which  can  dwell  together  in  unity,  or  are  they 
mutually  exclusive  and  contradictory  ?  Let  us  change  the 
character  of  the  question  :  May  we  with  data  of  knowledge 
frame  the  conception  of  that  Reality  on  which  all  dependent 
and  relative  beings,  both  minds  and  things,  depend  for  their 
existence,  and  which  serves  as  the  Ground  of  all  relations  and 
of  all  changes,  but  is  itself  destroyed  or  diminished  by  none  ; 
and  will  human  cognitive  faculty  bear  witness  to  the  satis- 
factoriness  and  to  the  validity  of  such  a  conception  ?  The 
theory  of  knowledge,  at  least,  does  not  render  necessary  a 
negative  answer  to  these  questions.  On  the  contrary,  it 
favors  and  even  demands  a  positive  answer.  It  also  suggests 
what  that  answer  shall  be. 

The  problem  of  knowledge  was  attempted  at  the  beginning 
in  a  wholly  presuppositionless  and  critical  way.  The  dis- 
cussion of  the  problem  closes  with  the  recognition  of  a  pre- 
supposition, which  has  been  found  lying  underneath  all  the 
earlier  analysis,  and  which  comes  to  the  surface  and  to  the 
front,  as  the  work  of  epistemology  is  concluded.  Man  knows 
Reality  because  Reality  is  of  his  own  kinship.  In  knowledge, 
will  answers  to  will  and  mind  to  mind.  Yes ;  there  are  even 
indications  in  the  very  nature  of  cognition  that  what  ethics 
and  religion  crave  to  discover  is  true;  and  that  heart 


KNOWLEDGE  AND  THE   ABSOLUTE  609 

speaks  to  heart  a  voice  whose  promises  are  often  obscure, 
but  never  wholly  false.  Knowledge  is  indeed  relative ;  but 
it  is  itself  the  establishment  of  a  relation  between  the  Re- 
vealer,  the  Absolute  Self,  and  the  Self  to  whom  the  revela- 
tion comes. 


39 


INDEX 


ABSOLUTE,  the,  knowledge  of,  364  f., 

591  f.,  608  f. 

Adickes,   his    criticism    of    Kant,   294 

(note). 
Esthetics,  judgments  of,  175  f.,  512  f., 

524. 
Agnosticism,    Mr.    Spencer's,    370    f., 

592  f. ;    nature   of,   371    f.,   382   f.; 
limits  of,  382  f.,  387  f. 

Albertus,  on  nature  of  knowledge,  54  f. 

Antinomies,  the  Kantian,  82  f.,  91, 
399  f..  410  f. ;  of  Hegel,  91;  nature 
of,  iu  general,  396  f.,  402  f. ;  Mr. 
Bradley's  doctrine  of,  399  f.,  417  f. 

Aquinas,  on  nature  of  knowledge,  52  f 

Aristotle,  his  schemata,  24 ;  theory  of 
cognition,  36  f. ;  doctrine  of  the  syl- 
logism, 36 ;  influence  on  Leibnitz, 
71  ;  and  on  Kaut,  74  f. 

Augustine,  doctrine  of  faith  and  knowl- 
edge, 31  f.,  46  f.,  50,  126;  and  of 
free-will,  50;  merits  of,  31,  47  f. ; 
compared  with  Descartes,  47 ;  influ- 
ence of,  54  f. 

Authority,  doctrine  of,  among  Church 
Fathers,  45  f. ;  Descartes  upon,  57  f. 

BERKELEY,  on  nature  of  knowledge, 
64  f. 

Bonaventura,  on  faith  and  knowledge, 
126. 

Bradley,  Mr.,  his  doctrine  of  "  Appear- 
ance and  Reality,"  89  (note),  422 
(note) ;  the  antinomies  of,  399,  417  f. ; 
his  doctrine  of  judgment,  435  f. 

CASPARI,  on  distinction  of  subject  and 
object,  204  (note) ;  on  pseudo-con- 
cepts, 464  (note). 

Categories,  validity  of,  9  f.,  147,  268  f., 
318  f.,  359  f.,  420  f.,  532  f.,  554  f.,  570  f. 


Causation,  Kant's  conception  of,  288  f., 
293  f.,  414  f. ;  reality  of,  290  f.,  320  f ., 
360  f.,  402  f.,  547  f. ;  relation  of,  be- 
tween body  and  mind,  551  f. 

Change,  category  of,  360  f .,  401  f. 

Cognition  (see  Knowledge). 

Concept,  relation  of,  to  judgment,  143  f., 
297  f. ;  of  experience,  326  f.,  333  f., 
335,  342  f. ;  pseudo-concepts,  464  f. 
(note). 

Consciousness,  relation  of,  to  knowledge, 
6  f.,  107  f.,  1 13  f.,  146  f.,  197  f.,  458  f. ; 
"  stream  "  of,  in  thinking,  144  f. ;  of 
Self,  197  f.,  202  f.,  208  f.,  302  f. ;  the 
ethical  and  sesthetical,  510  f. 

"Critique  of  Practical  Reason,"  rela- 
tions of,  to  Kantian  theory  of  knowl- 
edge, 73  f.,  86  f.,  409  f. 

"  Critique  of  Pure  Reason,"  positions 
of,  24  f.,  73  f.,  77  f .,  84  f.,  255  f.,  288  f., 
340  f.,  409  f.,  516  f. 

DESCARTES,  his  theory  of  knowledge, 
58  f. ;  doctrine  of  method,  60  f. 

Dreams,  knowledge  in,  235  f. 

Duhring,  on  principle  of  contradiction. 
363  (note). 

Duns  Scotus,  on  nature  of  knowledge, 
54  f. 

ETHICS,  the  cognitions  of,  504  f. 

Epicureans,  on  nature  of  cognition,  41  f. 

Epistemology,  problem  of,  1  £.',  11  f., 
21  f.,  106  f.,  126  f.,  373  f.,393  f.,  489; 
relation  to  psychology,  5  f.,  94  f. ;  as 
branch  of  philosophy,  8  f.,  372  f., 
587  f . ;  sources  of,  8  f . ;  relation  of, 
to  metaphysics  1 1  f .,  22,  25,  268  f ., 
365  f.,  372  f.,  495,  536,  587  f. ;  history 
of,  30  f.,  57  f. 


612 


INDEX 


Error,  nature  of,  424  f.,  432  f.,  439  f. ; 
limits  of,  427  f . ;  sources  of,  456  f. 

Experience,  as  trausceudent,  124  f., 
256  f.,  322  f.,  325,  329  f.,  494  ;  mean- 
ing of,  324  f.,  331  ;  conditions  of, 
326  f. ;  laws  of,  333  f . ;  as  criterion 
of  Truth,  468  f.,  493  f . 

FACULTY,  the  cognitive,  nature  of,  122  f., 
502  f.  (see  Knowledge). 

Faith,  Kantian  doctrine  of,  89  f.,  323  f. ; 
as  "  belief  "  in  Keality,  344  f .,  468  f. 

Feeling,  Hume's  doctrine  of,  67  f. ;  im- 
plied in  cognition,  124  f.,  160  f.,  173  f., 
344  f . ;  nature  of,  165  f . ;  classes  of 
the  cognitive,  167  f.,  173  f. ;  the  logi- 
cal, 180  f. ;  as  regulative  of  cognition, 
182  f. 

Fenelon,  on  Augustine,  47. 

Fichte,  conception  of  Wissenschafts- 
lehre,  13 ;  on  nature  of  cognition, 
89  f.,  134  f. ;  principle  of  identity,  274 

Fischer,  Kuno,  on  nature  of  philosophy, 
8f. 

GRIMM,  on  Hume,  68  (note). 
Grote,  on  Aristotle's  doctrine  of  cogni- 
tion, 36. 

HARTMANN,  on  problem  of  epistemology, 
10  (note). 

Hegel,  criticism  of  Kant,  16,  90  f. ;  epis- 
temological  position  of,  90  f.,  135  f., 
344;  on  thought  and  cognition,  135  f. 

Herbart,  view  of,  as  to  origin  of  cogni- 
tion, 98  f. 

Hume,  on  nature  of  cognition,  65  f. ; 
doctrine  of  imagination,  66  f. ;  influ- 
ence of,  68  f. ;  conception  of  causa- 
tion, 301 . 

IDEATION,  in  judgments  of  cognition, 

145  f.,  504  f. 
Identity,   principle   of,   205   f.,  268   f., 

319  f.,  533  f. ;  as  applied  to  the  Self, 

205  f.,  280  f. ;  logical  form  of,  272  f.  ; 

applied  to  reality,  275  f.,  533  f. 
Implicates,  the,  of  knowledge,  124  f., 

155  f.,  208  f.,  256  f.,  337  f.,  343  f . ; 

form  of,  344  f. 

JAMES,  Wm.,  on  "belief"  in  Reality, 
344  f. 


Jowett,  on  Plato's  view  of  cognition, 
33,  35. 

Judgment,  nature  of  the  cognitive,  143 
f.,  149,  150  f.,  297  f.,  436  f.,  453  f., 
465  f. ;  the  sesthetical,  175  f.,  500  f . ; 
the  ethical,  178  f.,  500  f. ;  as  convey- 
ing Truth,  434  f . 

KANT,  his  criticism,  4  f.,  73  f.,  516  f.; 
influence  of,  7  f .,  28  f.,  58 ;  conception 
of  epistemology,  1 1  f.,  73  f.,  77  f. ;  his 
formalism,  24  f.,  80  f.,  301  f.,  516  f. ; 
inconsistencies  of,  73  f.,  288  f.,  333  f., 
340  ;  assumptions  of,  74  f.,  82  f.,  86  f., 
255  f.,  517  f. ;  fallacies  of,  84  f.,  134  f., 
255  f.,  293  f. ;  view  of  intuition, 
106,  251  f.,  257 ;  on  nature  of  knowl- 
edge, 133  f.,  251  f.,  255  f.,  265  f., 
332  f.,  339  f.,  343  f.,  399 ;  and,  espe- 
cially, of  mathematics,  259  f. ;  view 
of  Reality,  265  f.,  293  f.,  340  f.,  391  f. ; 
on  "  Analogies  of  Experience,"  293  f . ; 
his  concept  of  experience,  332  f. ; 
and  theory  of  nescience,  391  f. ;  doc- 
trine of  antinomies,  399  f.,  410  f. ; 
his  "  Logic  of  Illusion,"  409  f. 

Kaulich,  on  knowledge  and  reality,  222 
(note). 

Klein,  on  the  categories,  198  (note). 

Knowledge,  problem  of,  1  f.,  105  f . ; 
nature  of,  5  f.,  22,  107  f.,  113  f., 
126  f.,  136  f.,  146  f.,  202  f.,  474  f. ; 
objective,  6  f.,  83  f.,  113  f.,  120  f., 
155  f.,  332  f.,  340  f. ;  assumptions  of, 
14  f.,  224  f.,  246  f.,  306  f  ,  337  f., 
513  f. ;  datum  of,  15  f.,  95  f.,  338; 
psychological  view  of,  94  f.,  193  f., 
228  f. ;  origin  of,  95  f.,  101  f.,  211  f., 
258  f. ;  growth  of,  102  f.,  126  f., 
211  f.,  224  f. ;  limits  of,  104  f.,  228  f., 
245  f . ;  certification  of,  105  f.,  155  f., 
239  f.,  393  f.,  493  f. ;  as  conscious- 
ness, 107  f.,  124  f. ;  as  activity,  123  f , 
137  f.,  146  f.,  190  f. ;  as  feeling, 
124  f.,  160  f.,  167  f.,  499  f.,  506  f . ; 
relation  of,  to  thinking,  130  f.,  258  f. ; 
nature  of  the  conceptual,  151  f., 
252  f.,  453  f. ;  of  Things,  193  f., 
208  f.,  221  f.,  304  f.,  450  f. ;  and  of 
Self,  193  f.,  243  f.,  304,  315  f., 
348  f.,  461  f.,  528  ;  degrees  of,  228  f., 
238  f.,  242  f.  ;  kinds  of,  22S  f.,  538  f., 
546  f. ;  relation  of,  to  life,  232  f., 


INDEX 


613 


462  f. ;  contrasted  with  opinion, 
234  f. ;  in  dreams,  235  f. ;  the  abso- 
lute, 243  f.,  538  f.,  602  ;  teleology  of, 
472  f.,  486  f.,  506  f.,  519  f . ;  ethical 
and  aesthetical  "  momenta  "  of,  500  f., 
511  f.,  521  f. ;  relation  of,  to  Reality, 
530  f.,  542  f.,  547  f.,  553  f.,  556  f. 

LEIBNITZ,  views  on  epistemology,  69  f. ; 
influence  on  Kant,  72  f. 

Locke,  his  method,  62  f. ;  and  doctrine 
of  cognition,  62  f. ;  compared  with 
Hume,  65 ;  influence  on  Leibnitz,  70. 

Logic,  its  attitude  to  epistemology, 
1 50  f . ;  view  of  fundamental  princi- 
ples, 268  f. ;  of  "  Illusion,"  409  f. 

Lotze.  on  theory  of  knowledge,  16, 
156  ;  and  nature  of  proof,  358. 

MANSEL,    his    "  Limits    of     Religious 

Thought,"  89  (note). 
Mathematics,  nature  of  its  cognitions, 

259  f. ;  relation  of,  to  truth  of  things, 

439  f. 
Memory,  relation  of,  to  cognition,  1 22  f., 

262  f.,  386  f. 

Metaphysics,  relation  of,  to  epistemol- 
ogy, 11  f.,  22,  350  f.,  365  f.,  530  f., 

559  f.,  574  f. 
Mysticism,  the  Hindu,  34  f. ;   its  view 

of  cognition,  61  f. 

NATURE,   the  concept  of,    518  f.,  536, 

575  f. 
Nourisson,  on  Augustine,  47,  50. 

OBJECT,  the,  Kant's  ambiguities  con- 
cerning, 120  f.,  133  f. ;  reality  of, 
133  f. ;  distinction  of,  199  f. 

Opinion,  as  related  to  cognition,  234  f. 

Origen,  doctrine  of  faith  and  knowl- 
edge, 31,  43  f.,  46 ;  merits  of,  31,  42. 

PAULSEX,  on  theory  of  knowledge, 
26  f.,  263  (note) ;  and  self-knowledge, 
225  (note). 

Perception,  Schopenhauer  on,  136 ; 
cognition  by,  148  f.,  224  f.,  250  f., 
264  f.,  376  f. ;  as  trans-subjective, 
224  f.,  376  f .,  447  f.,  474  f. ;  sceptical 
view  of,  376  f.,  444  f.  ;  final  purpose 
in,  475  f. 

Phenomenalism,  fallacies  of,  114  f. 


Plato,  on  nature  of  knowledge,  31  f. ; 

compared  with  Aristotle,  37  f. 
Psychology,  nature  of,  4  f. ;  relation  of, 

to  epistemology,   5  f.,  94  f.,    132  f., 

142  f. ;    of  cognition,   94  f.,   130  f., 

142  f.,  160  £. 

QUALITY,  category  of,  420  f. 

REALITY,  nature  of,  9  f.,  153  f.,  159, 
279  f.,  361  f.,  364  f.,  499,  528;  as 
given  in  cognition,  153  f.,  208  f., 
279  f.,  341  f.,  347  f.,  407  f.,  480  f., 
530  f.,  542  f. ;  theories  of,  559  f.,  571, 
574  f.;  ideality  of,  571  f. 

Reason,  problems  of,  8  f. ;  Aristotle's 
view  of,  37  f. ;  teleology  of,  479  f. 

Relation,  the  category  of,  359  f.,  401  f., 
418  f.,  554  f.,  577  f.,  594  f . ;  Mr. 
Bradley 's  view  of,  418  f. 

Riehl,  on  Hume's  epistemology,  65  ;  on 
concept  of  being,  183 ;  and  distinc- 
tion of  subject  and  object,  204  (note) ; 
on  Knowledge  and  Reality,  345 ;  on 
causation,  364. 

Romanes,  view  of  faith  and  knowledge, 
231  f. 

Scepticism,  limits  of,  357  f.,  367  f., 
379  f. ;  nature  of,  367  f.,  371  f. 

Schelling,  on  nature  of  cognition,  135  f. 

Schopenhauer,  on  nature  of  cognition, 
92  f ,  108,  136,  266  f.,  343,  543  f . ; 
exalts  perception,  136,  480  ;  criticism 
of  Jacobi,  339  ;  on  Kant's  "  Critique," 
425. 

Schuppe,  on  form  and  content,  147. 

Science,  conception  of,  252  f.,  298  f., 
329  f.,  444  f.,  482  f.,  543 ;  its  use  of 
causal  principle,  298  (note),  315  f . ; 
teleology  of,  489  f. 

Seashore,  C.  E.,  on  illusions  of  sense, 
451  f. 

Self,  the  cognition  of,  116  f.,  127  f. 
169  f ,  188  f.,  193  f.,  206  f ,  220  f., 
227,  348  f.,  361  f.,  385  f.,  461  f.,  528, 
549  f.;  the  feeling  of,  169  f..  188  f., 
211  f. ;  reality  of,  203  f.,  216  f.,  220  f., 
349  f.,  518  f. ;  identity  of,  205  f.,  273  f., 
281  f.,  352  f. ;  illusions  of,  446  f. 

Solipsism,  its  assumptions,  1 1 6  f.,  560  f. ; 
and  fallacies,  116  f.,  354  f.,  563  f. 


614 


INDEX 


Spencer,  Herbert,  on  nature  of  think- 
ing, 137;  his  agnosticism,  370  f., 
426  f.,  592. 

Spinoza,  his  epistemology,  51,  61  f. 

Stoics,  the,  on  nature  of  cognition,  38  f. ; 
and  criteria  of  truth,  40  f. 

Stumpf,  on  objectivity  of  cognition, 
116. 

Sufficient  Reason,  principle  of,  157, 
239  f.,  270  f...  283  f.,  315  f.,  320; 
statement  of,  by  logic,  286  f.,  300  f. ; 
as  used  by  science,  286  f.,  289  f.,  295  f., 
315  f. ;  origin  of,  296  f.,  317  f. ;  impli- 
cates of,  317  f. 

Sully,  on  "  belief,"  344  f. 

Syllogism,  Aristotle  on,  36  f. ;  nature 
of,  157  f.  (See  also  "Sufficient 
Reason.") 


THEORY  OF  KNOWLEDGE  (see  Episte- 
mology). 

Thing,  nature  of  cognition  of,  168  f., 
193  f.,  214,  217  f.,  221  f.,  227,  448  f., 
561  f. ;  real  content  of,  450  f. 

Thought,  relation  of,  to  cognition,  130  f ., 
258  f.,  479  f. ;  as  active,  137  f. ;  com- 
plexity of,  138  f. ;  as  an  active  relat- 
ing, 141  f . ;  principles  of,  268  f . ; 
283  f. 


Truth,  nature  of,  2  f.,  354  f.,  424  f., 
430  f.,  434  f.,  439  f . ;  contained  in 
judgment,  434  f.,  437  f.,  502  f. ;  crite- 
ria of,  40  f.,  452  f.,  457  f.,  461  f., 
466  f. ;  postulates  of,  157  f. ;  as  reached 
by  argument,  283  f. ;  related  to  con- 
duct, 430  f.,  465  f. ;  of  perception, 
447  f . ;  of  science,  452  f .,  489  f . 

VOLKELT,  on  nature  of  experience, 
331  f.  (note) ;  and  belief  in  Reality, 
468  (note). 

Volkmann,  view  of,  as  to  origin  of 
cognition,  98  f. 

WERNER,  on  distinction  of  subject  and 
object,  204  f.  (note). 

Wiudelband,  on  history  of  epistemology, 
30  f.,  42  (note),  53  (note);  on  Des- 
cartes, 61 ;  and  Leibnitz,  70. 

Wundt,  on  nature  of  thinking,  137  ;  and 
distinction  of  subject  and  object,  223  ; 
classification  of  judgments,  278 ;  cri- 
teria of  truth,  461  f. ;  nature  of  cog- 
nition, 474 ;  identity  of  subject  and 
object,  534. 

ZELLER,   on    objectivity   of  cognition, 

223  f. 
Zeno,  on  nature  of  cognition,  39. 


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